on federal judges and the Trump administration : NPR

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

On Wednesday in the Oval Office, as markets reeled and a trade war raged, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that had nothing to do with tariffs.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There were some very bad things that happened with these law firms.

DETROW: The law firm in question was Susman Godfrey, but it was only the latest of many to be singled out and targeted by the president.

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TRUMP: But they don't admit guilt. Remember that, they don't admit guilt.

DETROW: The law firms had been guilty of, well…

RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: In the president's telling, these are firms that have basically done things that are against American interests, that harm the United States.

DETROW: That is Ryan Lucas, NPR's justice correspondent.

LUCAS: If you talk to people on the other side, the goal, however, is quite different. Law firms that are targeted say that the effort here is to intimidate them, to punish them for the clients that they have represented.

DETROW: One of the clients that Susman Godfrey represented, for example, was Dominion Voting Systems, which got a massive settlement from Fox News for its lies about the 2020 election. Other firms had represented Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign or had staff that worked on Robert Mueller's investigation into alleged ties between Trump's orbit and Russia and possible obstruction of justice during Trump's first administration.

Now this work has put them in the crosshairs of the president. Some have fought back. Susman Godfrey, for instance, has filed a lawsuit to try and block the order. But others have cut deals. On Friday, Trump announced that five more law firms had reached deals with the administration in order to avoid damaging executive orders. They had agreed to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work for causes that Trump supports.

So today, for our weekly Reporter's Notebook segment, we are going to dive into this dizzying legal drama with Ryan. I started our conversation by asking about the kinds of ramifications that these executive orders have on the firms being targeted.

LUCAS: What these executive orders do is a couple things. They differ a little bit from executive order to executive order, but the main ones that we've seen suspend all security clearances for employees at the firms, bar the firm's employees from access to government buildings, government officials, end government contracts with the firms if there are any, and also reassess and ultimately terminate contracts that the firm's clients have with the government.

DETROW: So when firms talk about this having crippling effects on them, they're not wrong. These are serious limitations for a big law firm that's doing a lot of government-related work.

LUCAS: The firms that have sued over these executive orders have said that if these executive orders are allowed to stay in place, they're essentially a death knell for their firms. If you're a law firm and you can't meet with government attorneys or you can't even go into a government building, how are you supposed to appropriately and zealously advocate on your client's behalf? If you have a criminal client and you want to meet with prosecutors in order to discuss a potential plea deal, you can't do that.

DETROW: You can't go into a federal building.

LUCAS: You can't go in a federal building. You can't meet with DOJ officials. If you represent a corporate client who wants to have a merger, if you want to go talk to government attorneys about this, you can't do that. And so how can you actively and effectively advocate on your client's behalf if you can't do sort of this basic legwork of the legal profession? And so that means that other clients aren't necessarily going to come to you for business, and it also means that some of the clients that you have may go somewhere else.

DETROW: As you talk to people in the legal community, is there any precedent for what President Trump is trying to do here? Is – what are people comparing this to? How are people framing this when you talk to them?

LUCAS: Well, when the first executive order targeting a law firm came down, that was in late February, and it was against the firm of Covington and Burling. And it was a pretty narrow executive order. But then we got these other executive orders that were far more sweeping. And I talked to a couple of constitutional law professors at the time, and everyone who I spoke to said, this is just – this is unprecedented. We've never seen something like this come out of the Oval Office. We've never seen a president take these sort of actions. And everyone who I've spoken to said that this really does hammer away at, chisel away at, the very foundations of how the American legal system is supposed to work.

DETROW: We haven't even gotten to one of the big story lines in what's going on here, and that's the different ways these big law firms have responded. You talked about several that have filed lawsuits trying to block this, that are fighting back. A big storyline here is that several big law firms haven't fought back. They've cut deals with the Trump administration. What agreements are being reached, and how are people in those law firms responding when you talk to?

LUCAS: Well, actually, there are nine firms at this point – including five just on Friday – that have cut deals with the president to try to either get out from being targeted by an executive order or to avoid the possibility of a punitive executive order. The first firm actually to cut a deal was Paul, Weiss, a big New York-based firm, very prestigious, largely linked to Democrats. There are a number of former Biden administration and Obama administration officials who work at the firm. And the deal that they cut, the first one, was to provide $40 million worth of pro bono legal services to causes that both the firm and the White House support.

And there was a lot of outrage and pushback when Paul, Weiss cut this deal – disappointment that a firm this prestigious and with deep pockets like Paul, Weiss had decided not to stand up for the legal profession, in the views of many people, and instead to cut a deal with the administration. Now, eight other firms have since followed suit, including five, as I mentioned, just on Friday.

But what this all has done, what the president's targeting of law firms has done is really kind of expose a divide within big law. I remember having conversations with partners in certain law firms where there is a question of whether the legal profession would be able to provide a sort of united front to push back against what universally everyone who I've spoken to has viewed as an assault on the legal profession…

DETROW: Yeah.

LUCAS: …An assault on lawyers.

DETROW: Because lawyers are being punished for doing lawyerly things.

LUCAS: For doing their job.

DETROW: Yes.

LUCAS: For representing their clients zealously, which is what this whole system is based on.

DETROW: You've been at NPR – what? – seven or eight years at this point?

LUCAS: Yeah.

DETROW: And over the time that I have known you and worked with you, you have covered a wide range of pretty high-wire and pretty tense and, at times, unprecedented legal stories. You have covered the Mueller investigation. You have covered the House Republican attack on the Mueller investigation. You have covered the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. You have covered the sitting president's son, Hunter Biden, being put on federal trial. All of these different stories that really…

LUCAS: Don't forget the special counsel investigations into Trump himself.

DETROW: Those, too.

LUCAS: Those, too.

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DETROW: How does this fit into all of those other big stories? How – does this feel different?

LUCAS: What I would say to that is, this is not in a vacuum on its own…

DETROW: Yeah.

LUCAS: …Either. This is part and parcel of the sort of attacks that we're seeing on federal judges, threats against them online, calls from the president and members of his administration to impeach them for rulings that they don't like. I think what sets this apart from some of that other stuff is this is directed from the Oval Office. This is the power of the presidency being used against private actors, essentially accusing them and then judging them guilty of certain things and then using the power of the presidency to punish them.

DETROW: You had a past life where you were a foreign correspondent. Have you thought about or seen any parallels between the type of stories you covered then and what you're covering right now?

LUCAS: So half of my career thus far was as a foreign correspondent – in Poland, in Egypt, in Lebanon. It's a very different way of reporting. It's a very different style of reporting. You are focused more on kind of macrolevel things and trying to explain what's going on half a world away to an audience in the U.S. Covering the Justice Department, covering stuff in Washington generally, is at a much more micro level. It's a different kind of reporting. It takes a different kind of muscle to do.

DETROW: Yeah. Does that make it harder in a moment like now, where there's potentially a big shift happening – does that make it harder to kind of realize the big shift is happening, when you're not doing the big sweepy step back, and you're doing the moment-by-moment updates?

LUCAS: I think from a bandwidth level, it's harder, yes…

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DETROW: Yeah.

LUCAS: …Because just the pace of the news right now is so intense that it can be very hard to get the daily stuff done and be able to provide the kind of big-picture view for people. But I think what's similar in these two – not necessarily in the storylines or in trying to explain stuff. What is similar, though, I think, is, I kind of view my job now as translating a foreign land for people because the justice system is very different. It's…

DETROW: Yeah.

LUCAS: It doesn't function how a lot of people think it does. A lot of times, people will come to me with questions like, oh, can they do this? Oh, why did this happen? And often, it's just like, it's kind of an arcane judicial procedure. And so explaining sometimes to people, trying to translate what's going on in this weird judicial system with lawyerly language and trying to translate that into the way that normal people speak…

DETROW: Yes.

LUCAS: …And what makes sense to them, I think, is a big part of my job.

DETROW: I remember a moment where you were doing that live on the radio – I was part of that coverage as well – when the Mueller Report was released, and we were parsing this…

LUCAS: (Laughter) Please don't remind me (laughter).

DETROW: …This long legal document live and trying to do that translation in real time. Sometimes, we succeeded. Sometimes, we didn't (laughter).

LUCAS: Still have nightmares of that day.

DETROW: Well, hopefully, we don't do that again anytime soon. That is NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Ryan, thanks so much.

LUCAS: Thank you, Scott.

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