“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers” William Shakespeare - Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2
Trump Is the Real Thing’
With Donald Trump back in the White House, each new week produces an onslaught of radical policy initiatives.
In an essay posted on Substack, Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described a sequence — running from Feb. 21 to Feb. 27 — of what are, in effect, warnings designed to intimidate and even silence the nation’s legal community.
There is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Friday night sacking of the senior military lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force — lawyers who, by law, are required to provide “independent legal advice” to the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders.
There is President Trump’s revocation of security clearances for all of the lawyers at Covington & Burling who were in any way involved in pro bono representation of special counsel Jack Smith once he left government service (and Trump’s ominous suggestion, captured in the video in which he signed the revocations, that “you’re going to do this with more firms, right?”). There is the threat by interim D.C. U.S. attorney Ed Martin that Covington faces a criminal investigation for its representation of Smith.
Vladeck explained the significance of these developments:
What the Trump administration is doing is not just about specific lawyers representing unpopular clients, but is rather far more ominous: The administration is acting in ways that will necessarily chill a growing number of lawyers from participating in any litigation against the federal government, regardless of who the client is.
That, in turn, will make it harder for many clients adverse to the Trump administration to find lawyers to represent them — such that at least some cases either won’t be brought at all or won’t be brought by the lawyers best situated to bring them.
In addition to revoking the security clearances, Trump wrote in a Feb. 25 memorandum, “I also direct the attorney general and heads of agencies to take such actions as are necessary to terminate any engagement of Covington & Burling L.L.P. by any agency to the maximum extent permitted by law and consistent with the memorandum that shall be issued by the director of the Office of Management and Budget.”***
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