When President Donald Trump singled out specific white-shoe law firms for political retribution, he knew he was targeting some of the most top-notch legal professionals.
After all, so many of them work for him now.
Four counselors in the White House started their careers at the law firms Trump has tried to punish by barring them from government contracts and stripping lawyers of security clearances. Trump has appointed at least three senior-level executives at federal agencies who carry the same pedigree. And two of the most prominent attorneys at the Department of Justice developed their credentials at these firms too, with one spending years at a place Trump now claims “should not have access to our nation’s secrets.”
Trump has targeted Covington & Burling, Jenner & Block, Paul Weiss and several other major firms through executive orders that seek to press the weight of federal power on law firms that have challenged Trump’s political or personal ambitions. Those targets also include Perkins Coie, which was involved in the production of the Steele dossier that fueled speculation about Trump’s personal ties to Russia, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher, which successfully held Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani accountable for spreading election fraud lies and defaming two Georgia poll workers.
But even as Trump has signed executive orders targeting these firms, his administration has been stocked with legal talent from those same training grounds.
Jennifer Mascott, for example, seems like the perfect fit for the second Trump administration. She spent more than a year as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ law clerk. When Brett Kavanaugh faced a rocky path to the high court, she testified at his nomination hearing. She taught about the administrative state — the aim of MAGA’s ire — at the George Mason University law school that bears the name of the conservative legal movement’s patron saint, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. And she spent nearly two years at the Justice Department during Trump’s first term, sticking around until the very end even as he attempted to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.
In February, Trump tapped her to become the Department of Education’s general counsel. She currently describes herself on LinkedIn as “senior counsel to the president.”
She was also a summer associate at Covington & Burling in 2005. That credential isn’t so public now, though: Although she listed that experience on the résumé she submitted to the House of Representatives ahead of a hearing in 2021, it’s not on her LinkedIn profile nor a CV that says it was revised in April 2024.
Another Covington expatriate is Scott Gast, who spent more than seven years there and is now a deputy counsel to the president.
And a third is Brian P. Morrisey, who worked there for 10 months early in his career as an associate. Trump has tapped him to be the general counsel at the Treasury Department.
Daniel Lifton, an associate counsel in the White House Counsel’s Office, notes on his LinkedIn profile that he was a summer associate at Paul Weiss in 2019. Trump’s March 14 executive order sought to punish the firm for trying to hold Jan. 6 rioters accountable and for its relationship with Mark Pomerantz, an attorney it lent to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office while prosecutors built what turned out to be the only successful criminal prosecution against Trump.
Francis Aul, another associate counsel at the White House, worked as a “project assistant” for nearly three years at Jenner & Block. That firm was singled out in a March 25 executive order, apparently because, as the administration puts it, Jenner & Block “was ‘thrilled’ to re-hire” former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann after his involvement in the Mueller investigation that looked into Trump-Russia allegations.
The task of defending Trump’s many punitive executive orders has fallen on the DOJ, which is itself run by a deputy attorney general who, like many before him, spent time at WilmerHale, a firm known for employing high-profile former law enforcement. It’s also a firm Trump recently targeted.
In some circles, WilmerHale is best remembered as the place where former FBI director Robert Mueller decided to spend the rest of his post-government career, and where he was when he was tapped as the special counsel looking into the Trump 2016 campaign’s connections to Russia. Mueller brought on two of his fellow WilmerHale partners to assemble the top brass of that team.
But before that, in 2014, Mueller was at WilmerHale when the firm took in Todd Blanche, who’d just ended an eight-year stint as a federal prosecutor in New York City. Court records show Blanche worked on a handful of federal cases during the three years he was there, and he later went on to join another top U.S. firm before landing Trump as a client — and dedicating himself full time to defending Trump from criminal charges. Blanche is now deputy attorney general — and, as of this week, the acting librarian of Congress.
Yet another prominent Justice Department hire whose résumé bears the markings of a firm now radioactive to MAGA is Drew Ensign, the chief defender of Trump’s immigration policies in some of the biggest cases now making their way to the Supreme Court.
On his LinkedIn profile, Ensign notes that he spent two months in 2004 as a summer associate at Perkins Coie, the same firm that Trump, in his March 6 executive order, railed for having “worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws.”
In February, Trump nominated the attorney Joseph L. Barloon to be the deputy United States Trade Representative in Geneva, holding the title of ambassador and returning to the agency he worked at during the first Trump administration. Barloon has otherwise spent his entire 28-year legal career at the law firm Skadden Arps, yet another firm Trump targeted since his return to the White House.
Skadden Arps was pressured into striking a deal with Trump in late March, which the president described as a $100-million commitment to do pro bono work — a task that he later clarified in a follow-up executive order as likely including the defense of local police officers accused of abusive behavior.
Skadden Arps was also where James Baehr spent seven months as an associate. He’s now been tapped as the general counsel of Veterans Affairs.
NOTUS reached out to all those mentioned in this story to ask about the situation and their thoughts on the president’s campaign against the firms that helped them build their careers. None responded on Tuesday.
There are already signs that Trump’s executive orders targeting the firms could be short lived. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell struck down the executive order targeting Perkins Coie as “no more than unconstitutional retaliation for plaintiff’s First Amendment protected activity.” And she authored an extensive, 102-page opinion that paves a clear road for other judges to do the same with Trump’s other presidential decrees, which lean on similar language and legal reasoning.
“Eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the
path to more power,” Howell wrote. “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit … 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.’”
—
Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS. Jasmine Wright contributed reporting for this story.