(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has granted clemency to a pair of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, both of whom accused former President Joe Biden’s son of improperly leveraging his father’s political power to broker overseas business relationships.
Last Tuesday, Trump issued a full pardon to Devon Archer, who was sentenced to more than a year in prison for defrauding a Native American tribal entity in 2022.
Later in the week, Trump commuted the 189-month sentence of Jason Galanis for his role in multiple fraudulent schemes.
Archer and Galanis charted a similar path to their presidential pardons: Both men brokered business ties with Hunter Biden, were later found guilty of unrelated fraud schemes, pleaded with the Biden administration for executive clemency, and, when rebuffed, publicly accused Hunter Biden of improperly trading on his family name to secure overseas business deals.
Galanis went a step further than Archer by retaining a high-powered Washington lawyer with close ties to the Trump political machine: Mark Paoletta, whom Trump recently tapped for general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Paoletta did not respond to a request for comment regarding Galanis’ commutation.
Last year, Galanis testified before the House Oversight Committee about the Biden family’s business arrangements from a jail cell in Alabama. He asserted that Joe Biden was more engaged in Hunter Biden’s business dealings than the former president publicly let on, and that “the entire value add of Hunter Biden to our business was his family name and his access to his father, Vice President Joe Biden.”
Joe Biden has forcefully denied any wrongdoing and Republicans were unable to find evidence that he used his political perch to support his son’s businesses. A House impeachment inquiry concluded last August without any articles of impeachment drawn up.
Matthew Schwartz, an attorney for Archer, told ABC News that “the American jury system is an amazing thing, but as the trial judge held in finding serious questions about Devon Archer’s innocence, sometimes juries get it wrong.”
Schwartz said that Trump’s “pardon corrects a serious injustice, and finally allows an innocent man to be free of the threat of misguided prosecution. Mr. Archer is deeply appreciative of the President.”
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. stocks seesawed between gains and losses on Monday in the lead up to a promised fresh round of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on April 2, which he has dubbed “liberation day.”
The market rollercoaster came a day after Goldman Sachs raised its odds of a recession within the next year from 20% to 35%, citing the tariffs. The move marked the latest in an upsurge of recession fears on Wall Street in recent weeks.
A policy of wide-ranging levies on foreign goods could tip the U.S. into a recession, experts said. They pointed to risks of a slowdown for businesses mired in higher tax costs, as well as a shopping slump as consumers curtail spending to pad their savings to help weather price increases and a possible economic downturn.
The degree and duration of Trump’s forthcoming tariffs remains unknown, experts added, but they pointed to such uncertainty as another reason the economy could fall into a recession.
“If both businesses and consumers start to worry and pull back their spending, that is what can tip the U.S. over into a recession,” Kara Reynolds, an economist at American University, told ABC News.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, described potential tariffs on April 2 as “the fodder for an economic downturn.”
Trump has already announced a flurry of duties, including sector-specific tariffs targeting autos, steel and aluminum. The U.S. has also imposed levies on some goods from Mexico, Canada and China.
Over the weekend, Trump told reporters that the next round of tariffs could affect “all the countries.”
“The tariffs will be far more generous than those countries were to us, meaning they will be kinder than those countries were to the United States of America,” he said.
The Trump administration has largely declined to rule out the possibility of a recession. Speaking at the White House earlier this month, Trump said a “little disturbance” may prove necessary to rejuvenate domestic production and reestablish well-paying manufacturing jobs.
Experts generally define a recession by the shorthand metric of two consecutive quarters of decline in a nation’s inflation-adjusted gross domestic product, or GDP.
Tariffs could threaten economic growth and employment since duties slapped on imports risk increasing costs for businesses that rely on raw materials from abroad, some experts told ABC News.
Experts widely expect importers to pass along a share of the tariff burden to consumers in the form of higher prices, which could make the firms less competitive as they may struggle to retain customers who suffer sticker shock.
If business performance suffers, firms will likely freeze or reduce investment, threatening economic growth.
“As business investment goes down, that can trigger a recession,” Anne Villamil, a professor of economics at the University of Iowa, told ABC News.
Even the looming risk of tariffs can make shoppers uneasy, potentially sinking the economy further, experts said.
Consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. In March, consumer confidence dropped to its lowest level since 2021, according to a survey conducted by The Conference Board.
As consumer attitudes sour, shoppers could encounter tariff-induced price increases, leaving buyers even more frustrated.
“It’s already showing up in consumer confidence,” Jeffrey Frankel, a professor of capital formation and growth at Harvard University. “There is chaos and uncertainty around the tariff policy.”
By some key measures, however, the economy remains in solid shape. Hiring stands at robust levels alongside a historically low unemployment rate. Inflation sits well below a peak attained in 2022, though price increases register nearly a percentage point higher than the Fed’s goal of 2%.
Villamil, of the University of Iowa, acknowledged the strength of the economy in recent months. Still, she added, tariffs could plunge the U.S. into a downturn.
“The concern is that all of this policy uncertainty is putting the economy at risk,” Villamil said.
John McDonnell/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has often mused, even joked, about seeking a third term, but over the weekend he made his strongest and most serious comments yet on a move that constitutional scholars ABC News spoke with call virtually impossible.
“I’m not joking,” he told NBC News “Meet the Press” moderator Kirsten Welker in a phone interview on Sunday, before adding it was “far too early to think about it.”
“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said, including a scenario in which Vice President JD Vance ran at the top of the 2028 ticket with Trump as his running mate, only for Trump to assume the Oval Office after the election.
Legal and election experts told ABC News any attempt to win another four years as president would be an unprecedented breach of the Constitution.
“Trump may not want to rule out a third term but the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution does,” said David Schultz, a professor at Hamline University and an expert in constitutional law.
The amendment states, in part: “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.”
It was ratified in 1951, years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with the two-term tradition set by George Washington and secured a third term as World War II was breaking out.
“It would be completely unprecedented for a president to openly defy the dictates of the 22nd Amendment and, even more so, to attempt to run or serve again as president,” said Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional expert at the University of North Carolina.
“The threats and insinuations no doubt thrill his base, but there is no constitutional basis for the current president to try to serve as president after two elected terms,” Gerhardt said.
The only way legal way for Trump to be able to run for a third term, experts said, would be to amend the Constitution — an incredibly unlikely outcome as it would take two-thirds of both the House and Senate, or two-thirds of the states agreeing to call a constitutional convention. Then, any change would require three-fourths of the states to sign on for ratification.
“This statement by Trump was brilliant in terms of capturing and diverting attention,” said Schultz. “His supporters love it and his detractors will rage over it. In the process, no one will talk about the price of eggs, tariffs and a shaky stock market.”
Experts break down ‘methods’ floated by Trump and his allies
As for Trump’s claim that one of the “methods” could be to run as Vance’s vice president and then be passed the baton, experts point to the 12th Amendment from 1804 as a barrier.
“The 12th Amendment states that anyone who is ineligible to be president is also deemed to be illegible to serve as vice president,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This means that Trump could not serve as vice president, which is the post he would need for the Vance scheme to be executed.”
Steve Bannon, a fierce Trump ally, has also floated what he’s called alternatives to allow Trump to run in 2028.
Bannon, in remarks at the New York Young Republican Club gala in December, has argued that he could run again as Trump’s two terms in office were not consecutive.
“Since it doesn’t actually say consecutive, I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28? Are you guys down for that? Trump ’28?” Bannon said.
Schultz said that argument doesn’t have a sound legal basis.
“The overall limit of serving as president for ten years is both textual proof on the bar to run for a third term and an indication of the intent of the congressional drafters that they did not want anyone serving for more than two terms,” Schultz said.
He added that measure “was put into place to allow for a situation where a president dies more than halfway into a term and the vice president succeeds that person. The Constitution thereby allows for the vice president to serve out the remaining term and then serve two more terms, for a total of ten years.”
What happens if Trump tries anyway?
Trump has already tested the bounds of the Constitution governing presidential power several times in the first months of his second term.
Several Democrats viewed his comments on Sunday as another escalation against the rule of law. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin wrote on X: “This is what dictators do.”
In the past, Republicans have largely played off Trump’s musings about a third term as a joke intended to rile his opposition. But just days after his inauguration, Republican hardliner Rep. Andy Ogles introduced a resolution calling for the extension of presidential term limits to allow Trump to seek another four years in the White House.
“A crisis could arise if Trump runs for president or vice president in 2028,” Burden said. “The Constitution prohibits serving in office but not running for office. If Republicans nominated him, they would be betting that they can violate the Constitution and somehow allow him to serve if he wins.”
If Trump attempted to run, it would be up to election officials and then ultimately the courts to decide. This played out in the 2024 campaign, when several states challenged his eligibility to seek the Republican presidential nomination under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment due to his actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The legal battle went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Trump’s favor.
“If an ineligible person such as Trump is permitted to run knowing that he is not eligible to serve, it is a dangerous collision course in which the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law would be seriously tested,” Burden said.
James Sample, a constitutional law expert at Hofstra University, said Trump would lose in court should he attempt to run again.
“Most of the Constitution is written in broad, textured, difficult to define terms. What is a speedy trial? What is cruel and unusual punishment? What is equal protection? How much process is due process? The 22nd Amendment, however, is black and white,” Sample said.
“But if you can succeed in turning questions that are that clear-cut into debates, then the overall goal of undermining the Constitution and undermining the rule of law and maximizing executive power is served even if you lose the particular battle,” he continued. “This particular battle is not a winnable battle. He is not going to serve a third term, but merely by framing this as a debate, he will succeed in further eroding respect for the Constitution.”
(WASHINGTON) — Florida state Sen. Randy Fine, the Republican candidate in Tuesday’s special U.S. House election for the seat vacated by former Rep. Mike Waltz, said on ABC News Live on Monday that doesn’t think be breaks with President Donald Trump on policies.
“I don’t think so,” Fine told ABC News Live anchor Diane Macedo when asked if he disagrees with Trump on anything.
“I mean, look, I was the second Florida legislator to endorse [Trump] over Gov. [Ron] DeSantis [in the 2024 presidential primaries] … And so no, I mean, I believe in the America First agenda and the Donald Trump agenda. And more importantly, I think that when you have a team captain, you have to support the team,” Fine said.
Fine’s race is one of a pair of special elections for the U.S. House in Florida on Tuesday that might have an impact on the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives.
While the Republicans are favored to win in each district — given that both districts were ruby-red in 2024 — some have speculated that the margin between the Republicans and Democrats in each district could be tighter than anticipated, and voices within the Republican Party have raised concerns over Fine’s campaign. Fine and his allies, including President Donald Trump, have maintained he has momentum.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Graeme Sloan for The Washington Post via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams asked a federal judge on Monday to drop criminal corruption charges before a political deadline this week — trying to speed up a decision by the judge in the case.
The mayor wants the case dropped before petitions to get on the June primary ballot are due on April 3, according to his lawyer.
“Now, with the petition-filing deadline just days away, we respectfully urge the Court to issue its decision as soon as possible,” the mayor’s attorney, Alex Spiro, said in a letter to Judge Dale Ho.
The Justice Department has asked the judge to dismiss the charges without prejudice to free Adams to cooperate with President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. Without prejudice means the charges could resurface.
Ho accepted a legal brief urging him to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it could not be revived, eliminating an incentive for the mayor to bow to administration demands.
Adams pleaded not guilty in federal court last September to charges related to an alleged conspiracy with Turkish nationals that landed him lavish gifts in exchange for beneficial treatment.
Trump’s Justice Department asked in February to dismiss the charges, a move that caused several prosecutors to step down in protest, including the Trump-appointed interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, who alleged a quid pro quo.
“It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Sassoon wrote at the time. “Nor will a court likely find that such an improper exchange is consistent with the public interest.”
(WASHINGTON) — Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said on Sunday that if information had been leaked from top Trump national security officials’ Signal chat discussing plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen, American lives could have been lost.
“I was, yesterday, down in Hampton Roads. I did two big town halls, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake. There are people in the town hall who are either friends or relatives of folks who are on the [aircraft carrier USS Harry S.] Truman. Those folks were saying if their friends or loved ones were flying those jets and that information had been released and the Houthis were able to change their defensive posture, we could have lost American lives,” Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with co-anchor Martha Raddatz on ABC News’ “This Week.”
On Monday, a journalist revealed that national security adviser Mike Waltz had inadvertently included him in the chat with top Trump officials discussing plans for the Yemen attack. The Trump administration has pushed back against claims that the information included in the chat was classified information.
Warner said, “There is no question, regardless of agency, that this was classified … and those folks who are obfuscating and giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think they’re lying about they should know this is classified.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
A photo released by the Department of Homeland Security of the first flight of migrants who were part of Tren de Aragua, preparing to takeoff for Guantanamo Bay, Feb. 4, 2025. Via DHS.
(WASHINGTON) — The southwestern border mission and the detention operations at Guantanamo Bay have cost close to $330 million through mid-March, according to a U.S. official familiar with information briefed to Congress, as President Donald Trump attempts to fulfill his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration in the United States.
The deportation flights and detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, which only held a few hundred detainees at its peak, have cost nearly $40 million of that total.
There are only a few dozen deported migrants currently being held at Guantanamo Bay.
The estimated costs of the operations at the border and at Guantanamo Bay have not been previously reported.
The costs of the southwestern border operation are expected to continue to rise now that additional active-duty forces have continued to move to the border, where there are now more than 10,000 active duty troops as part of the mission on the border with Mexico.
Additional costs will likely include those associated with the new deployments of two U.S. Navy destroyers to that mission.
As of March 12, 2025, the military services had provided a total of $328.5 million in support for the border mission, including deportation flights and deployments to the border, according to a U.S. official familiar with the information briefed to Congress. Of that total, $289.2 million was for border security operations and $39.3 million was for the operations at Guantanamo Bay.
The cost at Guantanamo Bay is extremely high given the only several hundred detainees have been sent there — even though Trump had said tent cities there could hold as many as 30,000 deported migrants.
“There’s a lot of space to accommodate a lot of people,” Trump said of using Guantanamo Bay to house migrants on Feb. 4 after he signed an executive order to send migrants there on Jan. 29. “So we’re going to use it. … I’d like to get them out. It would be all subject to the laws of our land, and we’re looking at that to see if we can.”
Detainees with criminal records were housed at the detention facility that had been used to house enemy combatants from the War on Terror, and others were placed at the Migrant Operations Center that could only house 50 migrants.
Plans called for a tent city adjoining that migrant facility to be built that could house the numbers mentioned by Trump and other senior administration officials.
However, operations have come nowhere close to that as the phased construction initially envisioned building tent facilities for 2,500 people — but only 195 tents capable of housing 500 people have been built. And they have not been used at all because they did not meet U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention standards, such as including air conditioning.
On Friday, a delegation of Senate Democrats visited the migrant detention operations at Guantanamo Bay and later criticized what they called the “scale and wastefulness of the Trump Administration’s misuse of our military.”
“The staggering financial cost to fly these immigrants out of the United States and detain them at Guantanamo Bay — a mission worth tens of millions of dollars a month — is an insult to American taxpayers,” Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who sponsored the visit, said in a statement.
“President Trump could implement his immigration policies for a fraction of the cost by using existing ICE facilities in the U.S., but he is obsessed with the image of using Guantanamo, no matter the cost,” it added.
ICE has its own fleet of chartered aircraft that are used for deportation flights that cost about $8,577 an hour, according to its website. In contrast, the flights to Guantanamo Bay were conducted on C-130Js and C-17s.
The U.S. Transportation Command said it costs $20,000 per flight hour for C-130Js and $28,500 per flight hour for C-17s — and a one-way flight Guantanamo from El Paso, Texas is about 4 1/2 hours on a C-17 and six hours on a C-130J, allowing costs to add up quickly.
U.S. Transportation Command has also carried out deportation flights to Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, India and Panama. The most recent military flight occurred on Friday, when a military deportation flight landed in Guatemala.
ABC News reported last week that 21 deported migrants had been sent to Guantanamo Bay aboard a civilian flight coordinated by ICE, the first detainees to arrive there since the earlier removal of all 41 detainees at Guantanamo Bay to a detention center in Louisiana.
In late February, the 178 detainees at Guantanamo Bay at that time were flown out, with 176 returning to their home country of Venezuela and two others returned to the United States.
Former Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona joins supporters of the Department of Education workers during a clap-out event in front of the Department of Education building in Washington D..C., March 28, 2025. Via Arthur Jones II/ABC News.
(WASHINGTON) — Dozens of emotional Department of Education employees took part in a final “clap-out” in Washington, D.C., after losing jobs amid the Trump administration’s agency restructuring.
The administration slashed about 50% of the department’s workforce as part of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s strategy to abolish the department and send education decisions to the states.
The departing civil servants, who have either been terminated, retired or voluntarily bought out, have each been given about 30 minutes to retrieve their belongings this week — before exiting the building to clapping colleagues who were screaming “thank you!” outside the offices in Washington, D.C.
The last education chief, former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, visited his old office to celebrate employees affected by the workforce shakeup.
Clapping, shaking hands and cheering them along, Cardona told the civil servants, “Thank you for your service.”
“These public servants that are walking out right now deserve a thank you. They deserve respect. They’ve worked hard — not just during the time that I served as secretary but before that,” Cardona, wearing plain clothes, told reporters in a brief statement outside agency headquarters.
“I’m here, for the staff here, to say thank you,” he added.
DeNeen Ripley shook Cardona’s hand and told him her entire transportation division was eliminated. Ripley has worked at the department over 30 years and said she is taking an early retirement now.
“It feels like a death,” Ripley told ABC News. “It feels like a bad divorce of sorts, it just feels heartbreaking.”
Despite the massive overhaul and almost 2,000 employees lost, McMahon has stressed the Department of Education will continue to administer its statutory functions that students from disadvantaged backgrounds rely on, including grants, formula funding and loans.
“The president made clear today that none of the funding will stop for these [programs],” McMahon told ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott after Trump’s executive order signing last week, which directed McMahon to use all necessary steps permitted under the law to abolish the agency she’s been tapped to lead.
“I think it is his hope that even more funding could go to the states. There will be more opportunity for it. And, you know, he means what he says. And so there’s not going to be any defunding or reduction in funding,” she added.
A dream job “snatched”
Washington, D.C., native Leondra Richardson and a crowd of emotional colleagues across the department left the near-defunct agency’s headquarters for the final time Friday.
“It was a dream job,” Richardson told ABC News. “And that dream was snatched from me by the new administration.”
Richardson said her entire office, the Office of the Chief Data Officer, was folded earlier this month by the “reduction in force” implemented on March 11.
Sydney Leiher, a midlevel career public servant, said she felt forced out and doesn’t know what’s next for her. After leaving with her belongings, including a beach volleyball and Trader Joe’s sack, Leiher stressed the reforms are not only unjustified but also unpopular.
“It’s definitely emotional,” Leiher said, holding back tears. “I feel bad for all of the people in the Chief Information Office who have to, like, gather all of our laptops and equipment — like, they don’t want to be doing this either.
“It’s just a really sad day. But seeing the support out here from all of other Department of ED staff and then also, like, other federal agencies and then the public just makes it shows to me that, like, people do not want this, and like, this is not popular, and this shouldn’t be happening,” Leiher added.
Richardson and Leiher both worked in the same division, the OCDO, that was shuttered. Without the office, Richardson said there will hardly be anyone left at the federal level to collect data to show student improvements or delays.
The Trump administration has claimed it is making cuts to rid the government of bureaucratic bloat, but Richardson told ABC News her IT job was not policy based or bureaucratic. Leiher, an analyst who worked on artificial intelligence machine learning, told ABC News that she took this job after returning from the Peace Corps. She added that civil service work shouldn’t be about politics.
“I believe in public service,” Leiher said. “I believe in a nonpartisan civil service. We’re important, we matter.”
Meanwhile, departing civil servants such as Dr. Jason Cottrell, a data coordinator in the Office of Postsecondary Education, the largest grant-making division in the department, said he believes students are being put in jeopardy as the Department of Education is diminished.
“Our nation’s students are going to suffer,” Cottrell said. “I think of the doctoral students that are, you know, trying to do research on cancer or, you know, learning or whatever it may be, and without the funds to support them, they are going to — it’s going to be hard for them to succeed without those funds, and we’re not going to gain that knowledge that we need.”
The farewell ceremony at the department comes as “clap-outs” are set to continue across the country next week at regional offices in places such as Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco. But these moments hit especially close to home for Richardson, who detailed how she overcame a teenage pregnancy while growing up east of the river in the Southeast quadrant of the city.
She said it’s so close yet so “far away” from the federal government.
“I hate that I can’t be a voice or inspiration to the young girls growing up in Southeast D.C. that I wanted to inspire,” Richardson said, adding that she “wanted to give a chance to, you know, show that there’s another way and you can make it forward.”
“You can make a big impact and a big difference in the country coming from where we from,” she said.
(WASHINGTON) — Federal judges in D.C. on Friday partially blocked two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump targeting the Jenner and Block and WilmerHale law firms — temporarily halting Trump’s attempts to punish prominent law firms associated with his political foes.
In a lawsuit brought by Jenner and Block, D.C. District Judge John Bates described Trump’s executive order — which aims to strip the firms’ attorneys of any security clearances they may hold and severely restrict any business they may have before the federal government — as “troubling” and “disturbing.” He said it targets the firm’s and its employees’ First Amendment rights and rights to due process.
Bates, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, temporarily enjoined the administration from enforcing aspects of the order that seek to restrict government officials from engaging with officials from Jenner and Block, after he said the government failed to provide any substantive answers as to how employees from the firm threaten national security.
The judge said that attorneys representing Jenner and Block showed that they were likely being targeted on the basis of their protected free speech rights, and that they would suffer irreparable economic harm if it were fully implemented.
Later Friday, Judge Richard Leon also granted a temporary restraining order partially enjoining another executive order signed by Trump targeting the law firm WilmerHale.
Leon, also an appointee of former President George W. Bush, said several parts of Trump’s order clearly show “retaliatory actions based on perceived viewpoint” of employees of WilmerHale.
“There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm,” Leon said in his written order, following a hearing late Friday.
Leon is now the third federal judge to largely accept arguments from law firms targeted by Trump that his orders are likely unconstitutional — and that if implemented, Leon said, WilmerHale “faces crippling losses and its very survival is at stake.”
Both law firms filed suit in D.C. federal court on Friday to block the executive orders — the same day another major law firm struck a $100 million deal to preemptively avoid a similar Trump executive order.
The lawsuits accuse Trump of engaging in a sweeping campaign to intimidate major law firms who have represented plaintiffs currently suing the administration, or who have represented or at one point employed those he dislikes.
The Trump executive order threatened their futures as well as “the legal system itself,” Jenner and Block said in its lawsuit.
“These orders send a clear message to the legal profession: Cease certain representations adverse to the government and renounce the Administration’s critics — or suffer the consequences,” the Jenner and Block suit said. “The orders also attempt to pressure businesses and individuals to question or even abandon their associations with their chosen counsel, and to chill bringing legal challenges at all.”
The two firms are the latest firms seeking to counter what has been a rapid onslaught by the White House seeking to target individual firms that have hired or otherwise represented Trump’s political enemies.
Meanwhile, Trump said on Friday that the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom struck a deal to avoid one of his executive orders by providing $100 million in pro bono work during the Trump administration — among other guarantees.
The move has sent shockwaves through the legal community. The White House is prepared to target more big law firms, sources tell ABC News, and there are ongoing discussions among top advisers on strategy associated with possibly entering into negotiations with more of them.
Legal scholars have said there is little legal precedent for Trump’s war on Big Law, which has created a chilling effect across the legal community, and most will certainly have a chilling effect on his opponents who will need legal representation against him.
The firms’ legal actions come on the heels of successful effort by the law firm Perkins Coie, which earlier this month secured a court order blocking similar executive action signed by Trump.
(WASHINGTON) — Two law firms — Jenner and Block and WilmerHale — filed suit against the Trump administration on Friday to block executive orders signed by President Donald Trump last week that targeted their attorneys’ security clearances and bring to a halt any interactions they may have with the federal government.
“The Order threatens not only Jenner, but also its clients and the legal system itself,” Jenner and Block said Friday in its lawsuit. “Our Constitution, top to bottom, forbids attempts by the government to punish citizens and lawyers based on the clients they represent, the positions they advocate, the opinions they voice, and the people with whom they associate.”
Jenner and Block and WilmerHale are the latest firms seeking to counter what has been a rapid onslaught by the White House seeking to target individual firms that have hired or otherwise represented Trump’s political enemies.
“The President’s sweeping attack on WilmerHale (and other firms) is unprecedented and unconstitutional,” the lawsuit said. “The First Amendment protects the rights of WilmerHale, its employees, and its clients to speak freely, petition the courts and other government institutions, and associate with the counsel of their choice without facing retaliation and discrimination by federal officials.”
The firms’ legal challenges against what they have described as blatantly “unconstitutional” executive orders come on the heels of successful effort by the law firm Perkins Coie, which earlier this month secured a court order blocking similar executive action signed by Trump.
The lawsuits, filed in federal court in D.C. on Friday, accuse Trump of engaging in a sweeping campaign to intimidate major law firms who have represented plaintiffs currently suing the administration, or who have represented or at one point employed those he dislikes.
“These orders send a clear message to the legal profession: Cease certain representations adverse to the government and renounce the Administration’s critics — or suffer the consequences,” the Jenner and Block suit said. “The orders also attempt to pressure businesses and individuals to question or even abandon their associations with their chosen counsel, and to chill bringing legal challenges at all.”
Both lawsuits were initially assigned Friday to D.C. District judge Beryl Howell, who previously enjoined the Trump administration from enforcing its executive order against the law firm Perkins Coie — and described it as very likely unconstitutional. But on Friday afternoon, Howell ordered them to be randomly reassigned to a different judge — noting they raise separate factual and legal questions than the Perkins Coie case.
Earlier this week, Howell rejected an effort from the Trump administration to have her removed from overseeing the Perkins Coie lawsuit after they argued she showed clear bias against Trump.
