What did Donald Trump do today?

He blackballed another law firm for employing one of the hundreds of lawyers involved in prosecuting him.

In recent weeks, Trump has issued a series of executive orders effectively blackballing specific law firms. The orders strip security clearances (often required for legal work involving the government), cancel government contracts, and even bar employees from entering government buildings. Three major firms in the DC legal ecosystem have been targeted, and today he added a fourth, Jenner & Block.

What these firms have in common is that they all employ or represented his political enemies and imagined persecutors. Perkins Coie represented the Hillary Clinton campaign. Mark Pomerantz, a New York prosecutor who investigated Trump's financial crimes, had previously been a partner at Paul, Weiss. Covington and Burling represented Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who brought two separate federal cases against Trump—though their work for Smith had nothing to do with the Trump trials. 

Jenner & Block, the target of today's order, has won several injunctions for different clients against the second Trump administration. It also employs Mark Weissmann, who worked for independent counsel Robert Mueller. Weissmann has appeared on television news and written a book discussing the Mueller investigation, which found that Russia illegally interfered "in sweeping and systematic fashion" in the 2016 campaign on Trump's behalf, and that Trump and his campaign knew about and welcomed that help.

Unlike many of Trump's other executive orders, which are symbolic or purport to do things he has no actual ability to do, these actually would have an effect if allowed to stand. Having large swathes of the federal legal community unable to take federal clients would create chaos and punish clients who had nothing to do with the targets of Trump's wrath.

Trump's executive orders do not attempt to conceal the rationale: they are explicit in their claims that Trump is punishing the firms for even indirect contact with the people who "politicized" the justice system.

For his part, Trump has appointed his personal criminal defense lawyers to the top three positions at the Justice Department, as well as the position of Solicitor General, and is attempting to install another one as a US Attorney. 

Why does this matter?

• Collective punishment and guilt by association is what dictatorships do.

• The government is not there to settle personal scores for the president.

• Trump was indicted for and convicted of crimes because of his own actions, not because prosecutors existed to make those cases.

• In a democracy, it is not illegal, unethical, or cause for punishment to file a lawsuit against the government.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again used the power of the state to punish lawyers who opposed him or his political allies in court.

Since returning to office, Trump has repeatedly used the powers of his office to punish law firms who employed or represented his political enemies, or took positions he didn't like in court. He has revoked security clearances at those firms en masse (a basic job necessity for many lawyers in federal court), canceled routine legal contracts with them, and even tried to physically bar lawyers employed by them from federal buildings, which includes courthouses.

Some of the firms affected have signed consent agreements with the Trump administration in which they agree, in effect, to let Trump dictate their policies and clients to them. Others, however, have fought back in court—and they have been successful. 

Today, another law firm won a temporary restraining order against Trump's executive order targeting them. The firm, Susman Godfrey, represents Dominion Voting Services. That company received a $788 million settlement for its defamation claim against Fox News, which aired false claims that Dominion had "rigged" the 2020 election. Susman Godfrey continues to represent Dominion against Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell for their similar claims.

Trump continues to claim that he the real winner of the 2020 election, which in fact he lost by 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral college votes. It's not clear whether he actually believes any part of this, but he lost virtually every one of the dozens of court cases he filed related to it, and succeeded in changing none of its outcomes. That includes all the cases that reached the Supreme Court, where he appointed three of its members and openly stated his expectation that they would be "loyal" to him.

In a statement accompanying the order, the judge in the said Trump's actions were discriminatory and an unconstitutional government attack on the firm's First Amendment rights. She added that Trump's "personal vendetta" was a "shocking abuse of power" and said that Trump's attempts to personally pick and choose who could practice law were "immensely oppressive."

Why does this matter?

• It's not a crime to protect the rights of people Donald Trump is mad at.

• In a democracy, both sides get to be represented in court, not just the ruler.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He dispatched his press secretary to accuse Hillary Clinton of the things he and his campaign are being investigated for.

Yesterday, the federal grand jury in the Mueller investigation returned its first indictments. While the targets are not yet known, at least one target--Trump's campaign chair, Paul Manafort--had already been told by Mueller that he could expect to face charges.

Today, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to Twitter to claim that Hillary Clinton, and not Trump, had "colluded" with the Russian government. To substantiate this claim, she pointed to the fact that law firms employed by the DNC had helped to fund the research that became part of the Steele dossier. This is a report compiled by a former British intelligence agency that claims that the Putin regime has been actively cultivating Trump as a (possibly unwitting) means to the end of sowing chaos in American politics.

Because the Trump team's public relations strategy relies on painting the report as partisan anti-Republican lies, Sanders did not mention that the report was originally commissioned by the ultra-conservative Washington Free Beacon, which abandoned its efforts to derail the Trump campaign once he clinched the GOP nomination. 

No part of the Steele dossier has been discredited, and many of its most serious allegations regarding secret contacts between Trump's inner circle and agents of the Russian government have been independently confirmed. It is a matter of absolute certainty among American law enforcement and intelligence agencies that Russia deliberately acted to undermine faith in American democracy and sow chaos in its government by helping elect Donald Trump.

Why should anyone care about this?

• It's bad if a hostile foreign power has successfully carried out an attack on the American democratic process itself.

• A president who cannot acknowledge an attack on the United States is aiding and abetting the next attack on the United States.

• Someone who doesn't want people looking into his past probably shouldn't run for president.

• Eventually Donald Trump will have to stop blaming people who aren't president for the problems of his presidency.

CORRECTION An earlier version of this post said that Trump had a "small army of lawyers... charged with defending him in the Russia investigation." In fact, while Trump does have a great many personal and business lawyers to represent him in the dozens of pending lawsuits against him as a private citizen, he appears to be down to only one lawyer, Jay Sekulow, representing him in the Russia matter. Sekulow is not a criminal defense lawyer and had been acting chiefly as a spokesperson for Trump's actual criminal defense team.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He angrily insisted that he could get any defense lawyer he wanted for the Russia probe.

In a pair of tweets sent early this morning from Mar-a-Lago, Trump had his increasingly complicated legal situation on his mind:

Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case...don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on. Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted. Problem is that a new lawyer or law firm will take months to get up to speed (if for no other reason than they can bill more), which is unfair to our great country - and I am very happy with my existing team.

To put it mildly, there is a lot going on here--but the heart of it is that Trump seems to be reacting to the fact that news outlets reported on his inability to hire the husband and wife legal team of Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing to help defend him in the Russia investigation. Officially, the two declined the invitation because of conflicts of interest with other clients.

In fact, this is entirely plausible, although Trump--who had only known DiGenova from his appearances on Fox News--was reportedly underwhelmed by their first in-person meeting.

What's less clear is why Trump sought to call attention to his ever-more-precarious legal position with respect to the Mueller investigation. He has already lost four of his most visible legal representatives. His consigliere Michael Cohen is personally implicated in matters that Mueller is investigation. Another longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, was forced to resign after he made bizarre threats to an internet commenter. Marc Corallo abruptly resigned in July, apparently over concerns that Trump was actively committing obstruction of justice in his involvement in the cover-up of Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia meeting. And last week, John Dowd, Trump's lead lawyer, resigned as Trump seemed increasingly unwilling or unable to heed his advice.

Broadly speaking, though, Trump is correct: while he may not be able to get the lawyers he most needs (like impeachment expert Emmet Flood, or former Solicitor General Ted Olson), or keep them once he has them, there are more than a million lawyers in the US, and no shortage of those willing to take a call from the White House. Whether they can successfully collect on the bills they submit to Trump, though, is a different matter.

So what?

• An inability to let any criticism go unchallenged--no matter how minor or indirect--is not a sign of good mental health.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to say that defaming a woman he raped was part of his presidential duties—again.

In 2020, while he was still president, Trump had his Justice Department attempt to intervene as the defendant in E. Jean Carroll's defamation and sexual assault suit against him. As this site wrote at the time:

DOJ lawyers argued, in effect, that when Trump called Carroll a pathological attention-seeker who was endangering women who had been assaulted, he was doing so in his official capacity as the President of the United States.

This kind of move is routine in the many lawsuits involving the executive branch, but using it to keep a president out of civil court for personal attacks on the character of a woman he's accused of raping is totally unprecedented.

The attempt to make Trump's problems the government's was unsuccessful, but the inevitable appeals dragged the case on two years longer than it otherwise would have. Once that question was finally settled, the case proceeded to trial and Carroll won not one but two judgments against him, because Trump repeated the defamatory claims in defiance of the first judgment. The total damages awarded to Carroll were $88.3 million—$5.3 million for the first verdict, and $83 million for the second.

The jury in that trial found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The judge's final ruling made clear that the jury's verdict and the facts established in the case meant that Trump had raped Carroll in the sense that the word is commonly used.

Today, five years after the first time he tried this, Trump once again had his DOJ file a motion seeking to have the United States government stand in as the defendant while he appeals the original verdicts—the exact same stance as before, on the exact same matter, in the exact same case.

In his unrelated crusade against law firms who have opposed him or his administration in court, Trump has called for severe penalties for those who file "frivolous" legal claims. That term has a specific legal meaning, and it encompasses claims meant to delay justice that are "based on an indisputably meritless legal theory."

Why does this matter?

• "L'etat, c'est moi" is the slogan of a king, and presidents are not kings.

• Government lawyers don't exist to protect Donald Trump personally—even if most of them got their jobs because they used to be his criminal defense lawyers.

• Lying about a woman you raped in order to discredit her claim is still not part of the official duties of the President of the United States.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pushed Charles Kushner as the U.S. Ambassador to France.

In a post to his private social media network today, Trump said that Charles Kushner was a "tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker" and the founder of "one of the largest & most successful privately held Real Estate firms in the Nation." 

He also acknowledged that Charles is the father of Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. Jared, who could not pass a security clearance check, was nevertheless put in charge of Middle East policy during Trump's first term. He then received a $2 billion investment from the Saudi Arabian royal family while Trump was still in office.

What Trump did not mention was that Charles Kushner is a convicted felon who served time in prison after being convicted of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. (Perhaps not coincidentally, these are all things that Trump himself is known to have done.)

As part of that scheme, Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and arranged to record a sexual encounter between the two. He then sent the tape to his own sister in an effort to intimidate her into not testifying against him. Chris Christie, then a U.S. Attorney and since a prominent Republican politician, called it "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he had ever prosecuted.

Trump also did not mention that he pardoned Kushner for that "loathsome, disgusting crime" on the way out the door of his first term.

Why does this matter?

• It's insulting and counterproductive to make a felon the ambassador to a major military ally just because he's the crony of the president.

• People who commit "loathsome, disgusting crimes" shouldn't be given offices of public trust.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He basically admitted that he thought judges obeyed the president who appointed them.

This morning, U.S. District judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed by President Obama, issued a strongly worded but totally expected ruling denying Trump's attempt to block one of his accounting firms from responding to a Congressional subpoena. Trump, who for one reason or another is desperate to avoid any scrutiny of his finances, had been forced to claim that Congress had essentially no oversight role where the presidency was concerned. Mehta cited Congressional investigations into presidents from James Buchanan to Barack Obama in a 41-page decision, and concluded:

It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct—past or present—even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry. ...This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.

Trump responded by suggesting that the "crazy" legal opinion of "obviously, an Obama-appointed judge" didn't matter. This is part of Trump's traditional view of government, that he is personally owed "loyalty" from people he's given appointments or government jobs to—and where legal matters are concerned, personal protection.

Also today, Trump issued a last-minute order demanding that his former White House counsel Don McGahn not testify before the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow. (McGahn has been the target of Trump's outrage for several weeks now, after the Mueller report portrayed him as defying Trump in order to save Trump from committing prosecutable acts of obstruction.)

Trump, who continues to insist that he has been "totally transparent," is also currently fighting subpoenas to release his tax returns to Congress, suing Deutsche Bank (to whom he owes at least $130 million) to prevent them from cooperating with an investigation into his finances, declaring the entire Mueller report to be subject to executive privilege, and insisting that he will appeal any attempt at impeachment to the Supreme Court. (It doesn't work that way, although Trump may honestly believe that he can force justices he appointed to rule in his favor if he can somehow get it there.)

Why is this a problem?

• The president is not above the law.

• In American democracy under the Constitution, the presidency is subject to oversight by Congress and rulings by the judiciary.

• People with nothing to hide don't spend this much time and effort trying to hide things.