“It’s getting worse.” Not to raise an alarm or anything, Bill Kristol writes, but, “the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have abandoned all pretense that they are interested in something so old-fashioned as the rule of law.”
ICE draws weapons on people who ask questions
ICE arrests people for legally videoing arrests
ICE demands “papers” from 15-yr-olds
ICE threatened to shoot/arrest an ambulance crew
ICE hides their faces and drives cars without proper plates.
This administration routinely violates the 1st, 4th, 5th, 10th & 14th Amendments and says it’s “enforcing” the law.
And it’s not just Donald Trump’s insistence on getting revenge on perceived enemies by prosecuting them when “sound grounds for legal action don’t exist.” This administration is moving against any and all its critics.
Kristol explains, “the administration and its allies routinely claim that peaceful protests are controlled by ‘antifa’—which they in turn claim is a criminal and terrorist conspiracy. And they assert that such speech is a cover for and an incitement to violence. The administration is thus laying the groundwork for subjecting speech critical of it to suppression and prosecution.”
We are in “off with their heads” territory. Trump is gunning for protected speech. His agents have conducted another military strike against an alleged small vessel off the coast of Venezuela:
Trump said, “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics” and “was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks …” was in “International Waters” and that “six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike.”
How long before summary executions for alleged drug smugglers becomes executions for alleged “criminal and terrorist” protesters?
Kristol admits to the irony that popular mobilizations like No Kings are actions he once opposed. But this administration is not only pursuing unpopular activities and, in the case of slaughtering alleged drug dealers, illegal. Murdering alleged drug dealers landed former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte in prison in The Hague. A consummation devoutly to be wish’d for Dear Leader.
Kristol concludes:
“No Kings” is an expression of protest. But it is also an affirmation of responsibility. We the people ordained and established our free government. It’s up to us to keep it.
This message doesn’t change, and faces pedestrians and drivers on the bridge. Don’t own a TV station? As many as 7,000 pairs of eyes view signs like this during rush hour in this city of 95,000.
A reader with “exactly zero artistic ability” asked for a post on how I’m creating protest signs readable from passing cars. (I take my cue on readability from Patrick Randall, the Freeway Blogger. He’s still out there.)
I have no artistic ability either. What I do have in stock are a supply of corrugated plastic yard signs left over from past political campaigns. (After each election, local art teachers ask us for signs that won’t be reused.)
The sign above is the size I use on an overpass. It’s 36×22. The message facing the highway changes each week. The other side (shown above) is visible by pedestrians. The signs I use at street level are 36×12. (I tend to sandwich two smaller ones together so they bend less in the wind.)
To be easily readable from cars passing by at 35 mph, the letters need to be 3-1/2 to 4 in high. At 4 in, the message is readable by expressway drivers from 75 to 100 ft away.
I use Microsoft Publisher. (Engineers tend to work in the MS world.) I create a custom page size to match the backing board and craft a message that will fit the board. One side faces the expressway on the overpass. At street level, the full message tracks across two sides. I rotate overhead every few seconds so drivers coming both directions can read the full message. We’re talking about 4 to 6 words. Roughly 400-point type.
Once that’s done, rename and save the Publisher file, then reset the page size to 8-1/2×11 (landscape). Cram as many letters as will fit comfortably on that page size (what my laser printer will print; don’t try this with an ink jet!).
Insert a duplicate Publisher page after each letter set, edit, and repeat the process until the entire message is spread across however many pages it takes. (Uses up a lot of black toner, but we’re saving the country, aren’t we?)
After printing out all the pages (letters), use a cheap plastic paper trimmer and a straight edge to line them up in order, then simply Scotch tape them together. Then Scotch tape each line to the corrugated plastic backing board.
Cheap, fast, down and dirty. I’ve been rained on and the signs are still usable after they dry. Deciding on a message sometimes takes longer than assembling the sign itself (maybe a half hour).
My preferred overpass doesn’t have chain link fencing like a pedestrian overpass. There is a risk that a sudden gust of wind could tear the 36×22 sign out of my hands and have it tumble onto passing cars. Not good. As a safety measure, I installed a couple of eye bolts through the sign (seen at top) and connected them with parachute cord. The cord, cinched with a plastic spring cord lock, goes around the wrist.
It all looks very professional from a distance. People ask where I get them made up.
Freeway Blogger paints white latex onto corrugated cardboard bicycle boxes. He mocks up his message on a computer, then uses a digital projector to project his message onto the white cardboard. He traces the letters in pencil, then fills them in with black paint using a foam paint brush. He uses cheap bungees to fix them in place on chain link fence at overpasses and along the interstates, then walks away.
I hold mine with just my hands during rush hours to get reactions from passing drivers. Seeing someone out there (bravely, they think) and making eye contact encourages them (I hope) to get off their couches. Really, they need to see us out there.
Materials: Used corrugated plastic campaign signs 8-1/2×11 paper Laser printer Scotch tape Cheap paper cutter Software: Microsoft Publisher or similar
The State Department said it has revoked the visas of at least six people for their comments on the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The agency revoked visas from nationals of countries including Argentina, South Africa and Mexico, the department said in a social-media post Tuesday. The department didn’t say if the people were in the country at the time their visas were revoked and didn’t specify what kinds of visas they held or when the visas were revoked.
In one screenshot shared by the agency, a person identified as an Argentine national said Kirk “devoted his entire life spreading racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric.” A German national wrote “when fascists die, democrats don’t complain,” according to the post.
“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” the department said.
You may wonder if the State Department has assigned people to go through the social media feeds of every visa holder, which actually wouldn’t be surprising. But no. They don’t need to:
Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, said the day after Kirk’s death that he had directed consular officials to “undertake appropriate action” after seeing social-media posts that glorified violence.
“Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people,” Landau said in a post on social media.
They’ve got American citizens informing on their neighbors just like the Stasi. It’s a money saver.
Axios reports on the few, the brave few, who are starting to feel something stiffening in their spines:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia: Once one of Trump’s most loyal and outspoken supporters on Capitol Hill, Greene (along with Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie) has been vocal in calling on the White House to release the Epstein files. And Greene has seemed to echo Democrats in chiding GOP congressional leaders over the shutdown.
“I’m carving my own lane,” Greene posted on X last week, adding that she was “absolutely disgusted” that health insurance costs for millions of Americans would soar if the GOP-led Congress doesn’t extend the tax credits Democrats are demanding to end the shutdown.
2. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt: He told The New York Times that he disagreed with Trump’s decision to send Texas National Guard troops to Illinois as part of the president’s crackdown on crime. Stitt, like scores of Democrats, called it a violation of “states’ rights.”
“Oklahomans would lose their mind” if Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) “sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” Stitt said.
3. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox: He took to X over the weekend to express his unhappiness about the Trump administration canceling North America’s largest solar power project, saying, “This is how we lose the AI/energy arms race to China.”
4. Vivek Ramaswamy: Theformer GOP presidential candidate, now running for Ohio governor, made clear he disagreed with the administration’s pressuring of ABC that led to the brief suspension of late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, a frequent Trump critic.
5. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas: He compared FCC chair Brendan Carr’s implied threats to broadcasters such as ABC to mafia tactics, calling them “dangerous as hell.”
Cruz said he plans to introduce a bill to make it easier for people to sue the government for censorship.
6. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine: The senator, who’s up for reelection next year, criticized White House budget director Russ Vought last week over his decision to permanently lay off thousands of federal workers during the shutdown.
“Regardless of whether federal employees have been working without pay or have been furloughed, their work is incredibly important to serving the public,” Collins said.
Check out Marge and Joe:
When the right loses both Joe Rogan and Marjorie Taylor Greene on the issues in the same week, you know it’s going to get rough for Republicans.
Joe Rogan on ICE: “The way it looks is just horrific.”
QAnon queen MTG on the economy: “I’m just living in reality from here on out.” pic.twitter.com/QOJpVNMyiN
Alex Jones: "[Pam] Bondi's not bad, she's just lazy. [Dan] Bongino is emotional and a big baby. [Kash] Patel is compromised and it's just so sad." pic.twitter.com/Od5kFu9r1i
I don’t know if any of this adds up to something bigger shifting. But it’s interesting especially coming from Greene, Cruz and Stitt. They’re true blue MAGA.
More than 20 world leaders gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Monday for a summit focused on ending the war in Gaza. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi described the conference as bringing “a single message to mankind: Enough war. Welcome to peace.”
The summit followed a landmark hostage and prisoner exchange. Yet the emotional scenes as people returned to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank represent only the end of the initial phase of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. (“The phases are all a little bit mixed in with each other,” he conceded in Egypt.) At the end of Monday’s gathering, Trump signed a document with the leaders of Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar—though there weren’t any Israeli and Palestinian representatives present and it is unclear what the document said.
What comes next is even hazier. Michael J. Koplow writes that the deal forces three reckonings that will shape Israel’s future. For Gaza, which lies in ruins, the damage is hard to comprehend: More than 67,000 Palestinians were killed in 700-plus days of war. Just before the cease-fire began, FP’s John Haltiwanger spoke with Mathieu Bichet, a deputy medical director at Médecins Sans Frontières, about the myriad challenges of reconstruction.
Trump remains central to the question of governance in Gaza—if frustratingly opaque as to his intentions. The U.S. president is nominally director of the so-called Board of Peace proposed by the cease-fire agreement, but on Monday, he seemed to hedge, noting that he has many other commitments. As major issues such as Hamas’s disarmament remain unresolved, Palestinians face a dilemma, Omar H. Rahman writes: “Every concession made by Hamas is irreversible, while every concession made by Israel can be undone.”
He said he spoke with Hamas today and they’re totally ready to disarm so it’s all good. Trump Gaza Resort is on the way!
Trump: “I spoke to Hamas, I said you will disarm right? They said, yes sir we will disarm.” https://t.co/PVBO90evMy
Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.
“Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued.
Two members of the chat responded:
Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber. And everyone that endorsed but then votes for us is going to the gas chamber.
🔥RH
BW
When do we start bullying dude?
AK
We have a solid 3 people who can prob have them want to jump
BW
If they vote for us why would they be gassed?
AK
When do we bring that side out?
PG
Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man.
in reply to
“If they vote for us why would they be gassed?”
We only want true believers.
🔥RH
JM
Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic
❤️PG🤣AK
AK
I’m ready to watch people burn now
JM
We gotta pretend that we like them. “Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax”. Boom – they’re dead
They’re so fun and smart. And they show the kind of good judgment we need in our young leaders.
The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.
Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.
“The more the political atmosphere is open and liberating — like it has been with the emergence of Trump and a more right wing GOP even before him — it opens up young people and older people to telling racist jokes, making racist commentaries in private and public,” said Joe Feagin, a Texas A&M sociology professor who has studied racism for the last 60 years. He’s also concerned the words would be applied to public policy. “It’s chilling, of course, because they will act on these views.”
The dynamic of easy racism and casual cruelty played out in often dark, vivid fashion inside the chats, where campaign talk and party gossip blurred into streams of slurs and violent fantasies.
There’s a lot of talk among the Democrats about the need to turn the page and make room for a new generation of leadership. I think that’s right. But keep in mind that the Democrats aren’t the only ones. Look what’s coming down the pike on the other side.
They have learned a lot from Trump. When confronted, many of them said that they thought the chats were doctored. So we have the whining and blaming to look forward to as well.
On US peace negotiations between Israel and Gaza: “The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the PM of Israel urging him not to cut a deal right now because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign.” pic.twitter.com/IbJQXPurbO
Trump denied doing that, asserting that Netanyahu “knows what he’s doing.”
“I did encourage him to get this over with. You want to get it over with fast. Have victory, get your victory, and get it over with. It has to stop, the killing has to stop,” Trump added.
“From the start, Harris has worked to tie Israel’s hand behind its back, demanding an immediate ceasefire, always demanding ceasefire,” Trump said at the event just a few hours after his press conference, adding that it “would only give Hamas time to regroup and launch a new October 7 style attack.”
“I will give Israel the support that it needs to win but I do want them to win fast,” Trump added.
Yeah. 14 months later and tens of thousands more dead, Trump takes his victory lap.
Over the past ten years we’ve seen countless letters signed by experts and former officials decrying something President Donald Trump has said or done. Whether it’s scientists, economists, national security and intelligence veterans or doctors, just to name a few, thousands of people with impeccable credentials and decades of experience have put their reputations on the line by publicly sounding the alarm about the Trump administration’s illiberal, destructive policies. None of it has seemed to make any difference.
But those five-alarm warnings are still important and necessary, if only to maintain an historical record of dissent should we manage to emerge from this dark time with some shell of our nation intact. Legal scholars, former judges and law professors are having a collective heart attack over what the administration, particularly the Justice Department and Supreme Court, are doing to the rule of law and the Constitution. Right now, the only bulwark appears to be the lower courts.
Before the 2024 election, the New York Times interviewed fifty highly respected members of the legal establishment. Both parties were evenly represented; those interviewed had held essential jobs in every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan. Most told the Times they were concerned about a second Trump term based on what he had done in the first.
Even so, some who had previously worked with Trump vouched for the Justice Department’s inherent integrity, stressing that, given the department’s structure, it would be very difficult for its employees to act in bad faith. And since Trump preferred appointees with elite credentials, they assumed he would only hire qualified and experienced people. When the Times recently caught up with these former officials, their hair was on fire.
“Eight months into his second term,” they reported, “Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs. ‘What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,’ said another former official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term… The responses captured almost universal fear and anguish over the transformation of the Justice Department into a tool of the White House.”
The story noted that, this time, many more refused to speak on the record because they feared retribution from the White House, which is chilling in itself, if unsurprising. For every political elite who has the guts to speak out right now, there are five more who have been cowed into silence.
Remember, this group includes half Republicans, quite a few of whom worked for Trump in the first term. And yet “all but one of the respondents rated Trump’s second term as a greater or much greater threat to the rule of law than his first term. They consistently characterized the president’s abuses of power — wielding the law to justify his wishes — as being far worse than they imagined before his re-election.”
Ahead of Trump’s inauguration in January, we knew congressional Republicans would rubber stamp everything the president wanted, so there’s no surprise there. And it was no secret that the administration would be prepared to push the envelope beyond anything from Trump’s first term. Nevertheless, I didn’t think Trump would appoint internet trolls and far-right agitators, such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino — who became the director and deputy director of the FBI — to such important roles. Even loyalists like Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, I expected, would be concerned about maintaining a face of seriousness and professionalism.
The Times pointed out that in Trump’s first term, especially toward the end, the system held mainly because even sympathetic loyalists like former Attorney General Bill Barr and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen refused to go along with the president’s bogus election claims. This time around, the former officials know that will not happen: “‘No one in the room now will say no,’” said the Justice Department official from Trump’s first term. The lesson Trump drew from his first term, the former official continued, is that the lawyers who talked him out of ‘bad ideas’ were the wrong kind of lawyers.”
These former insiders were apparently unable to see just how radicalized Trump and his accomplices had become once having learned how to maneuver the levers of power. No one is more responsible for that than the Supreme Court.
The court’s immunity decision alone gave Trump the green light to do whatever he wanted and let everyone else pick up the pieces. Coupled with the misuse and abuse of the court’s emergency — or “shadow” — docket, the conservative majority has only reinforced the idea that the president is to be given total latitude without constitutional restraint.
A number of lower court judges have expressed concern about the high court’s terse orders on these shadow docket rulings, most of which have overturned their judgments to favor the president’s position — and leaving them vulnerable to threats from right-wing commentators, and even the White House. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller recently posted on X that judges who rule against the president are committing “legal insurrection” and claimed: “There is a large and growing movement of left-wing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded and it is shielded by far-left judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
It takes courage to maintain integrity in the face of comments like that by someone with such power.
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have all issued rebukes to lower courts that deigned to question their reasoning. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appearing on Fox News over the weekend, explained that the court didn’t want to provide reasoning for using the shadow docket to overturn these lower court rulings — many of which actually upheld established precedent in denying Trump’s radical power grabs — because the justices might change their minds later. Meanwhile, the author of the immunity decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, has appeared so blind to the consequence and destruction the court has wreaked that leading legal scholars have compared him to Roger Taney, the chief justice whose illustrious reputation was forever defiled by his Dred Scott opinion.
Some have suggested that all this adds up to a constitutional crisis. Justice Barrett had insisted it does not. But there can be little doubt we are in the midst of an historic legal emergency — and, so far, the only people who appear to be preventing our system of justice from crumbling entirely are the states and lower federal courts. May they have the fortitude to hold out, or things will get much worse.
Honestly, I loaded the NYT front page this morning and instantly thought that the man on the left was ICE until I saw the AK. The cutline identifies him as a “Hamas gunman.” The man on the right is from CBP/ICE.
Candidate Donald Trump urged his 2016 rally crowds to “knock the crap out of” protesters. Of another protester, he said, “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” He made no secret of his desire to bust heads to keep people in line. (Actually, to have others bust heads on the coward’s behalf.) Americans elected him anyway. And again in 2024 after he’d incited a violent insurrection over losing the 2020 election. What you see is what you get with Trump. A majority of Americans who routinely pledge allegiance to our democratic republic see an autocrat and voted for him.
Trump reaffirmed his desire to rule a police state since retaking the White House. He’s remodeled the Oval Office to look more like a Saddam Hussein palace. His family and several aides are raking in crypto cash from Persian Gulf states, allege Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Trump accepted a tricked-out 747 from Qatar, a state he once decried as “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” Now all is forgiven, and Qatar is “a steadfast ally in pursuit of peace, stability, and prosperity, both in the Middle East and abroad.”
Like treasure-hunter Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) in Romancing the Stone (1984), Trump ain’t cheap, but he can be had.
In Egypt celebrating the historic ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Trump rhapsodized about how little crime there is in the autocracy run by Egyptian strong man Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.*
Trump on Egypt: "They have very little crime. Because they don't play games. That's why. Like we do in the United States with governors that have no idea what they're doing." pic.twitter.com/at7ceM6fI8
“They have very little crime, because they don’t play games, that’s why. They don’t play games like we do, in the United States, with governors that have no idea what they’re doing,” Trump said. “But they don’t have crime. I ask about crime, and they almost don’t even know what I’m talking about.” Because autocracies bust dissident heads, that’s why. And worse.
Egypt is categorized as “not free” by an analysis from Freedom House, a democracy advocacy organization that formed to rally the world against the threat of Nazi Germany nearly a century ago. Political opposition in Egypt is nearly nonexistent. Civil liberties that are currently taken for granted in the U.S., such as the right to protest or the freedom of the press, are choked by the tight fist of the Egyptian government, which has been dominated by the military since a 2013 coup.
“Most of Egypt’s provincial governors are former military or police commanders,” Freedom House assessed.
Trump’s ongoing project to turn the U.S.A. into his own police state puts him at odds not only with blue-state governors where he seeks to deploy troops, but the chair of the National Governor’s Association, Kevin Stitt (R) of Oklahoma.
“Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” Stitt told The New York Times.
This is insane!
Don Lemon interviews an American citizen who was rounded up by ICE and thrown in the back of a moving truck with 40 other people.
The Trump administration offers a bad-faith rationale for deploying federalized National Guard troops to Chicago and Portland. Protests there against brutal and seemingly random roundups by ICE have sparked loud protests. Talking Point Memo observes:
Judge April Perry, a Biden appointee, blocked Guard deployment in Illinois from the bench Thursday, calling the administration’s characterization of protests as “rebellions” — terminology the law requires in order to trigger the power to deploy troops — “audacious.”
She mentioned, when the Justice Department lawyer brought up threats to federal officers, that “mine started about 10 minutes after I got this case.”
Shorter Perry: Put a sock in it.
Still, the Trump administration and its allies are so confident that they’ll ultimately prevail in the courts that Trump has kept on the shelf a backup plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, which gives the president extremely broad latitude to deploy the military for law enforcement activities, per multiplereports.
Read: “Knock the crap out of” anyone who refuses to bow.
In Portland, an ambulance was summoned to the ICE office to treat an injured protester (not clear how he was injured). But when the patient was loaded inside, ICE officers refused to let the ambulance leave and threatened to shoot the ambulance driver: https://t.co/flnNSv7ce4
Trump and his pet psychopath, Stephen Miller, are asking Americans to accept the dismantling the U.S. Constitution turning their “land of the free” into an autocratic police state under the promise of illusory safety and crime reduction. Benjamin Franklin had scornful words for any people who would do accept that.
The New Republic spotlights attorneys forsaking big money to take on bigger bad guys.
The NYU School of Law currently is tracking 434 legal challenges to the Trump administration’s hollowing out of the Constitution. Those challenges, Matthew Wollin notices, involve a certain kind of lawyer, “Big Law” attorneys willing to give up big bucks to fight legal battles worth waging.
Trump 2.0 made a point of targeting those most able to restrain his grab for power and to defend the targets of his retribution campaign. Initially, many kowtowed to threats he issued by executive order. Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps went down early. “Then came Wilkie Farr, then Millbank; and then the rest of them began to fall like dominoes—including Kirkland & Ellis, which is the largest law firm not just in the United States but in the whole world.” Eleven of the country’s most presigious law firms capitulated and cut deals.
But some attorneys from those firms quit in disgust, giving up six- and seven-figure salaries to fight to preserve democracy. Imagine.
This movement of lawyers away from the capitulating law firms was highly directed, with many of them ending up at organizations that were expressly devoted to fighting the fights that their former firms wouldn’t. This included not only existing firms but brand-new organizations devoted to defending the rule of law—organizations that are now handling much of this new wave of litigation on behalf of high-profile public servants suing Trump over their jobs.
Lowell & Associates is one such organization. It is a firm that was launched this past May, headed by a veteran Washington lawyer. Lowell quickly scooped up two of the aforementioned Skadden associates (Cohen and Frey) who publicly quit in protest. The firm’s self-stated mission? “The provision of pro bono and public interest representation in matters that defend the integrity of the legal system and protect individuals and institutions from government overreach and other threats to fundamental rights.” They are currently representing Lisa Cook, three senior FBI agents who were fired for improper political reasons, and Susan Monarez, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.
The Washington Litigation Group is another firm that emerged in the months following Big Law’s Big Capitulation. It is a new “boutique non-profit firm” that was launched this past August, and whose stated mission is to “represent individuals and institutions who have been unlawfully targeted for exercising their rights.” It hired Nathaniel Zelinsky, an associate who left Milbank in the aftermath of the deal, and is currently representing three members of the Financial Oversight Management Board who were improperly relieved of their positions; Tara Twomey, who was ousted from her position as the director of the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees; and Cathy Harris, a former member of the Merit Systems Protection Board who was removed by Trump from her post, among others.
Wollin cites other attorneys and firms who made public that they placed their dedication to the law above Big Law’s commitment to profit. Rapidly shifting focus to defending democracy is a “striking devlopment,” Wallin believes, “particularly in an industry that is not exactly known for its rapid innovation.” Young attorneys not yet jaded by their profession now sort 850 prospective employers into “Caved to Administration,” “Complying in Advance,” “Other Negative Action,” “Stood Up Against Administration’s Attacks” and “No Response.”
It is difficult to say with certainty if it is the existence of these new organizations that has enabled so many public servants like Lisa Cook and Rebecca Slaughter to affirmatively take their fight to Trump, or whether these firms are simply good at being in the right place at the right time. But the degree to which this particular type of litigation has increased in tandem with these new organizations’ involvement certainly suggests that there is some correlation.
[…]
In short, by doing something so blatantly unconstitutional that nobody else ever dared to do it—attack lawyers for representing his political opponents—Trump inadvertently may have managed to do the one thing no one else thought possible: make highly paid lawyers stand up for what they believe in.
These heroes are not household names. If America survives Trump 2.0 perhaps Hollywood movies and TV shows will change that.
