Boris Epshteyn Lands Trump In Legal Sh*tpile. Again.
Everyone's got a superpower.
The never-ending dispute over Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms for crimes of “woke” is heating up again. A year ago, the firms that folded got mocked, and the firms that fought got injunctions. After oral argument in May, the DC Circuit seemed almost certain to affirm the four separate trial judges who ruled that the orders were a gross violation of the First Amendment. And yet the matter refuses to die — thanks to the continued involvement of one particular chaos agent: Boris Epshteyn.
Evil Forrest Gump
Ten years into the Trump nightmare, Boris Epshteyn has become famous for his Zelig-like ability to show up wherever Trump is in trouble and make it much, much worse. He was pushed out of his first stint in the administration after drafting a Holocaust Remembrance Day speech that somehow failed to mention Jewish people. He stuck around in Trump’s orbit, serving as Trump’s legal advisor during the Mueller investigation, where his signature move appears to have been maximal, indiscriminate assertions of executive and attorney-client privilege. His efforts to help overturn the 2020 election got him indicted in Arizona and named Co-Conspirator 6 in Trump’s election-interference indictment. And after Trump’s victory in 2024, he was accused of running a straightforward pay-to-play operation, charging a fee to recommend hopefuls for administration jobs.
White House Counsel David Warrington — a former Stop the Steal lawyer with no particular allergy to advancing Trump’s dumbest legal theories — argued that Epshteyn should be kept as far away from the president as possible.
“Epshteyn’s conduct must be stopped and his employment and proximity to President Trump should be terminated. Otherwise, his conduct will likely lead to, at best, a scandal involving the incoming Trump administration, and at worst could lead to criminal indictments,” Warrington wrote last year in a memo reported by the New York Times.
In short, Boris Epshteyn is the last person on earth who should have been anywhere near the negotiating table in 2025, as Trump rolled out executive orders kneecapping the supposedly “liberal” law firms.
Naturally, he was right in the middle of it.
Hold still, I’m retaliating against you for your speech!
Between March and April of 2025, Trump signed five nearly identical executive orders targeting the law firms Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey. While vaguely gesturing in the direction of supposedly illegal DEI, the orders made clear that they were punishing the firms for their political affiliations and professional advocacy. The order targeting Perkins Coie mentioned Hillary Clinton, Fusion GPS, and the Steele “dossier,” before accusing it of working “with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification.” A similar presidential memorandum targeted “all members, partners, and employees of Covington & Burling LLP who assisted former Special Counsel Jack Smith during his time as Special Counsel.”
The orders suspended security clearances for law firm employees, cut them off from government contracts, barred them from federal buildings, and blacklisted them from federal hiring — sanctions designed to cripple the firms by making them toxic to their own clients.
