President Donald Trump arrives on Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport, Friday, March 28, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
March 30, 2025 - 8:08 AM
WASHINGTON (AP) — The executive order against one of the country's most prestigious law firms followed a well-worn template as President Donald Trump roared down the road to retribution.
Reaching far beyond government, Trump has set out to impose his will across a broad swath of American life, from individuals who have been targeted to institutions known for their own flexes of power and intimidation.
Paul Weiss, a New York law firm born in 1875, got the word that it was in trouble.
Trump ordered that federal security clearances of Paul Weiss attorneys be reviewed for suspension, federal contracts terminated and employee access to federal buildings restricted. One of its former lawyers once investigated Trump as a Manhattan prosecutor.
The decree was averted in the most Trumpian of ways —with a deal.
After a White House meeting with the firm's chairman yielded various commitments, including $40 million worth of legal work to support the administration's causes, the order was rescinded.
The episode showed not only Trump's aggressive use of the power of the presidency to police dissent and punish adversaries but also his success in extracting concessions from law firms, academia, Silicon Valley, corporate boardrooms and more.
Just one day after Paul Weiss' deal, Columbia University disclosed major policy changes at the risk of losing billions in federal money. Before that, ABC News and Meta reached multimillion-dollar settlements to resolve lawsuits from Trump.
“The more of them that cave, the more extortion that that invites,” said Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer in Trump’s first term and now a critic. “You’ll see other universities and other law firms and other enemies of Trump assaulted and attacked into submission because of that."
Some within the conservative legal community, by contrast, think Trump is operating within his rights.
Other targets have taken the opposite tack, with two different law firms since the Paul Weiss deal suing over the executive orders. Judges on Friday temporarily blocked enforcement of key sections of those orders against Jenner & Block and WilmerHale.
If the submissions have been surprising, then Trump's interest in reprisal was less so, telegraphed as it was during the campaign. “I am your retribution,” he told supporters in March 2023.
But retribution for what, exactly? Against whom? How?
The answers would come soon.
‘An Existential Crisis’
Fresh off four federal and state indictments that threatened his political career, Trump came immediately for the prosecutors who investigated him and the law firms he saw as sheltering them.
Out went members of special counsel Jack Smith's team and some prosecutors who handled cases arising from the Jan. 6 riot.
Then an executive order stripped security clearances from lawyers from Covington & Burling who provided legal representation for Smith himself during the threat of government investigations.
A subsequent order punished Perkins Coie for representing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign
Its business in the balance, Perkins Coie hired Williams Connolly, a firm with an aggressive litigation style, to contest the order. A federal judge said the administration’s action sent “chills down my spine" and blocked portions of it. The decision could have been a precedent for other firms to rely on.
The Paul Weiss chairman said it, too, initially intended to sue over the order that targeted the firm in part because former partner Mark Pomerantz had several years earlier overseen an investigation into Trump’s finances for the Manhattan district attorney. But even a courtroom victory wouldn't erase clients' perception that it was “persona non grata” with the administration, according to an internal email from the firm's chairman, Brad Karp.
Support from fellow firms never materialized and some even sought to exploit Paul Weiss' woes, Karp said.
When the opportunity came to cut a deal in a White House meeting, he took it, pledging free legal services for causes Trump supports, like the fight against antisemitism.
The outcry was swift. Lawyers outside the firm ridiculed what they saw as a weak-kneed response. More than 140 alumni of the firm assailed the capitulation in a letter.
Within days, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, were hit with executive orders over their affiliation with prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s special counsel team that investigated him during his first term. Both sued and got orders blocking sections of the edicts. Trump, meanwhile, has unleashed a new directive to sanction any lawyer who brings “frivolous” litigation against the government.
“I just think,” Trump said, “that law firms need to behave themselves.”
Inside the ivory tower
Another New York institution was facing its own crucible.
Trump had taken office against the backdrop of protests at Columbia University tied to Israel's war with Hamas. The protests prompted its president to resign and made the Ivy League school a target of critics who said an overly permission campus environment had let antisemitic rhetoric flourish.
The Trump administration in March arrested a Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident in his university-owned apartment building and began investigating whether Columbia hid students sought by the U.S. over their involvement in the demonstrations.
The administration also canceled $400 million in grants and contracts for the school and demanded changes as a condition for restoring the money.
Two weeks later, then- university President Katrina Armstrong said she would implement nearly everything sought by the White House. Columbia on Friday announced Armstrong's exit from the position.
He went after media, too
ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
Then Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump after it suspended his Facebook accounts after the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has taken action against news organizations it disagrees with. The White House last month removed Associated Press reporters and photographers from the small group of journalists who follow the president in the pool and other events after the news agency declined to follow Trump’s order to rename the Gulf of Mexico. AP sued.
On Friday, a federal judge in New York halted the administration’s efforts to dismantle Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded international news service.
News from © The Associated Press, 2025