Defenestration At DOJ Previews Fate Of Feckless Firms

Liberty for safety. What could go wrong???

On Wednesday, Milbank LLP became the fourth law firm to strike a deal with the Trump White House, pledging $100 million in pro bono services to fend off a wildly illegal executive order designed to put them out of business. At the same time, more than 500 law firms submitted an amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie’s challenge to the president’s executive order targeting it.

“The rule of law cannot long endure in the climate of fear that such actions create,” the amici warned.

And yet big firms are falling over themselves to make a deal with the devil and give away hundreds of millions of dollars in billable hours to support the president’s “priorities.” Kirkland & Ellis is reportedly vying to be the next shop to sacrifice its dignity and ethics.

The problem with protection money, though, is that you have to keep on paying it. And President Mob Boss is anything but a man of his word.

He’s been sued thousands of times for, among other things, not paying his bills, including by his attorneys. His own lawyers refused to meet with him alone, knowing that if they went in without a witness, he would just lie about the conversation. And now he’s playing with house money: What does he care if the law firms balk? He can always turn around and sanction them again if they fail to do his bidding!

These megafirms would do well to heed the fate of Erez Reuveni, who was, until Saturday evening, the acting deputy director of the Justice Department’s immigration litigation division.

Reuveni’s sin was telling the truth in court. Specifically he admitted to Judge Paula Xinis that he had tried and failed to get the Justice Department to follow the law when it came to Salvadoran refugee Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, one of the migrants deported to El Salvador after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act.

In 2019, an immigration judge granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal, finding that he faced probable persecution at the hands of the Barrio 18 gang if deported to his native El Salvador. For the next five years, Abrego Garcia lived in Maryland with his wife and children, all of whom are US citizens, attending every ICE check-in and committing no crimes. On March 12, he was snatched up by ICE agents and summarily deported to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador based on the apparently false assertion that he is a member of the MS-13 gang.

Reuveni was tasked with defending the government’s position in a case filed by Abrego Garcia’s family demanding that the government repatriate him.

To be clear, there is no defense — legal or moral — of the government’s refusal to bring Abrego Garcia home. All parties agree that it was illegal to deport this man to El Salvador. The government calls it an “error,” but still refuses to bring him back because it would destroy the constructive fiction that the US cannot control what happens to the people they’ve cast into a lawless hellhole. It would also be inconvenient for the DOJ’s effort to convince the Supreme Court that Judge Boasberg lost jurisdiction over the fate of the deported immigrants when they departed US airspace, and thus the government didn’t defy a court order to turn the planes around.

As Steve Vladeck points out in his excellent One First Substack, there’s no legal justification for the government’s claim to have placed these deportees beyond the court’s jurisdiction. Indeed the government’s claim to have no ability to control the conditions of their confinement, much less get someone out of CECOT, was fatally undermined last week when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem filmed a propaganda video of herself inside the prison, with the deported migrants stacked up like battery hens in a cage behind her.

This put Reuveni, a career prosecutor with 15 years at the DOJ, in a bad spot. At a hearing on Friday before Judge Xinis, he admitted that he had tried and failed to determine by what legal authority the government had detaining and then deported Abergo Garcia.

“Your Honor, I will say, for the Court's awareness, that when this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question,” he conceded. “I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory.”

Lawfare senior editor Anna Bower has a thread of all the times during the hearing on Friday when Reuveni fulfilled his duty of candor to the court by admitting that he had no client control and no legal leg to stand on.

The career DOJ lawyer who had put his name on a raft of dubious Trump pleadings, including in the challenge to the Alien Enemies Act deportations and the civil suit seeking to overturn Illinois’s sanctuary city laws, had finally reached the end of road.

“If you’re not buying our jurisdictional arguments, like, we’re done here,” he conceded dejectedly.

This was correct as a matter of law, and featured prominently in Judge Xinis’s order for the government to bring Abergo Garcia back by midnight Monday. But Reuveni’s candor was wildly out of step with the White House, which has taken a characteristically aggressive stance.

(The White House Studio Ghibli-ing the president and VP to slag a federal judge on social media is a very weird timeline.)

They’d prefer that DOJ lawyers echo the maximally antagonistic approach taken by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who smirked “We suggest the Judge contact [Salvadoran] President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.”

That is patently untrue, since we are the ones paying El Salvador to hold these men under filthy, dangerous conditions. If we could get Kristi Noem home, we can certainly do the same for Abergo Garcia.

At the same time, there is a strong argument that Reuveni’s flaccid defense was inappropriate: If he could not advocate zealously for his client, he shouldn’t have been in the courtroom at all. And so perhaps it was unsurprising that Reuveni was immediately put on leave and locked out of his DOJ email, along with his supervisor August Flentje for failing to rein him in.

“At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States,” Attorney General Pam Bondi huffed in a statement released to the media Saturday. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

The episode should serve as a cautionary tale for the law firms now lining up to volunteer to do pro bono work that accords with the Trump administration’s “priorities.” Because soon they’ll be in Reuveni’s shoes, asked to defend the indefensible.

In their internal communications about the deals, these law firms insist they’ll be doing exactly what they’ve always done.

“The only commitments that we have made to the Government are those that we are happy to make,” chirped Milbank chair Scott Edelman in an all-staff letter announcing the preemptive surrender.

“There is nothing in our agreement that gives the Administration the right to dictate or approve the matters we take on,” he promised. “Nor have we restricted our pro bono activities or limited positions we could take on behalf of our clients.”

But of course that cannot be the case. Trump called these law firms out for “potentially depriving those who cannot otherwise afford the benefit of top legal talent the access to justice deserved by all” by representing pro bono clients in cases that “make our communities less safe, increase burdens on local businesses, limit constitutional freedoms, and degrade the quality of American elections.”

Clearly the president intends for them to represent different pro bono clients, and therein lies the problem.

If instructed to submit amicus briefs in support of the administration’s plan to destroy birthright citizenship, will they insist that the 14th Amendment and Wong Kim Ark don’t count? Will they claim that actually the Constitution gives the president the spending power, and so he can impound half the federal budget? What if the government taps them to file civil suits against the dozens of people Elon Musk falsely claims have broken the law in some fashion? And what happens when the firms take on pro bono clients the administration doesn’t like, particularly in law suits against the government?

Will these firms risk the administration’s wrath by saying “no?” Will they pay the vig and zealously make terrible arguments that humiliate them and potentially subject them to sanctions? Or will they take the cases and just do a “bad” job like Reuveni? Because the knock on Reuveni is that, if he couldn’t do a “good” job, then he should have withdrawn or quit. He should not have gone into court and conceded that his client’s case was bullshit.

But the law firms groveling before Trump can’t quit. They made a deal with the devil, and soon enough he’s going to demand payment. At which point they’re going to have to decide whether to “zealously” argue terrible cases on behalf of terrible people, or risk losing whatever protection they think they’ve bought.

Maybe the cowards will get lucky and the three law firms that cowboyed up and sued Trump will succeed in getting the executive orders blocked. At that point, the surrender agreements will be unenforceable — to the extent that they ever were — and the administration may memory hole the entire debacle. But the firms that buckled will have already taken the reputational hit. Clients will know that they can be intimidated by the government, and prospective associates may choose to go somewhere else rather than risk being assigned to represent Libs of TikTok or some antivaxx loon suing Pfizer over the covid jab.

It’s not as stupid as crashing the global economy because you can’t do basic math. But it’s still a ridiculous, craven waste.