WASHINGTON — On Friday, a federal judge halted a White House executive order directed at a prestigious law firm, marking a setback for President Donald Trump’s efforts to retaliate against the legal profession.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie breached several constitutional provisions and mandated its immediate invalidation.
The directive aimed to penalize the firm by revoking the security clearances of its lawyers, preventing its employees from entering federal buildings, and terminating federal contracts associated with the firm.
It was one in a series of similar executive actions aimed at punishing some of the country’s most prestigious law firms, in some cases over prior legal representations out of favor with the Trump administration or because of their associations with prosecutors who previously investigated Trump.
In the case of Perkins Coie, the White House cited its representation of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 presidential race.
Howell wrote in her 102-page order, “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’”
The decision was not surprising given that Howell had earlier temporarily blocked multiple provisions of the order and had expressed deep misgivings about the edict at a more recent hearing, when she grilled a Justice Department lawyer who was tasked with justifying it.
So far, all the firms that have challenged orders against them — Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block and Susman Godfrey — have succeeded in at least temporarily blocking the orders. But other major firms have sought to avert orders by preemptively reaching settlements that require them, among other things, to dedicate tens of millions of dollars in free legal services in support of causes the Trump administration says it supports.
