SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
rule of law
Trump Attacks the Right to a Lawyer
The presidential assault on the lawyers and law firms representing his litigation adversaries is an attack on the very foundation of the legal system.
Mar 12, 2025
In America’s legal system, both sides to a dispute are entitled to counsel. President Donald Trump rejects that premise because he prefers a one-sided battle that he is more likely to win.
To that end, he is using his special ability to combine vindictiveness with strategy. Wielding the power of the presidency, he is penalizing the attorneys who represent his opponents. Even more troubling, other lawyers are helping him undermine the foundation of our justice system.
Throughout his campaign, candidate Trump railed against his supposed “enemies.” In addition to prosecutors who pressed charges and judges who presided over cases against him, he promised “retribution” against private-sector lawyers who had represented his political adversaries. As president, he’s keeping that promise.
President Trump is not a lawyer, but he did swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Who will hold him to that promise?
The president’s first attack came in early February when he revoked the security clearances of Mark Zaid and Norm Eisen—outspoken Trump critics. For decades, Mr. Zaid has represented whistleblowers in Republican and Democratic administrations, including the whistleblower at the center of President Trump’s first impeachment. Mr. Eisen helped House Democrats develop the articles of impeachment. Because the president “flooded the zone” with tariffs, terminations, and tantrums, those suspensions received little news coverage.
His second blow landed on February 25, 2025, when he issued an executive order suspending the security clearances of all attorneys and employees at Covington & Burling—a premier 1,300-attorney global law firm representing former special counsel Jack Smith. During the campaign, he had threatened Smith repeatedly with deportation and worse. Smith retained Covington, which represented him pro bono before he resigned as special counsel. The firm is still his defense counsel.
The executive order prevents Smith’s attorneys from accessing important government materials and makes defending him more challenging. Perhaps more importantly, it was also a warning to other attorneys contemplating the representation of anyone the president does not like.
The third attack occurred with the executive order of March 6. He suspended the security clearances of individuals at Perkins Coie—a global law firm of more than 1,200 attorneys worldwide. Among other penalties, the president instructed the heads of all federal agencies to limit Perkins employees’ access to federal government buildings.
At their core, the executive orders are a transparent effort to intimidate other attorneys who represent the president’s adversaries. For example, his stated justifications for the Perkins suspension are nonsensical. He complains about work that two partners at the firm, Marc Elias and Michael Sussman, did on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016. But both lawyers left Perkins years ago. Trump’s order also criticizes the firm’s involvement in successful challenges to voter restriction laws in Republican-controlled states. And he even includes the firm’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a reason for its suspension.
The presidential assault on the lawyers and law firms representing his litigation adversaries is an attack on the very foundation of the legal system. The American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL)—an elite body of litigation attorneys—responded immediately to his executive orders:
Lawyers throughout the country should unite in condemning these actions in the strongest possible terms.
The White House’s retaliating against a law firm merely because it represented a client against whom the Executive Branch has a grievance, threatens the bedrock principles of our system of justice. Under those principles, everyone is entitled to legal representation. In criminal matters, that right is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.
The ACTL’s statement outlined the broader consequences of the president’s assault:
Lawyers cannot be denied access to the courts nor should their advocacy be throttled merely because the government disagrees with the positions asserted or because litigants seek to enjoin Executive actions that may violate statutory and constitutional rights of a free people. When government retaliation is grounded in efforts to punish lawyers for the parties that they represent or the positions that they assert, our system of justice is undermined.
Likewise, speaking for the entire profession, the American Bar Association declared, “These government actions deny clients access to justice and betray our fundamental values.”
To become a licensed member of the bar, every attorney swears an oath to uphold the Constitution. Every attorney is bound by rules of ethical conduct requiring them to support the rule of law. Every attorney has an obligation to enhance public confidence in the legal system. Yet attorneys drafted, reviewed, and approved the executive orders that are undermining the bedrock principles of our justice system.
President Trump is not a lawyer, but he did swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Who will hold him to that promise? Asking for a friend of democracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Unparalleled Attack on the Rule of Law' by Trump Puts US on Global Watchlist
"The Trump administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society," said one senior leader with the group CIVICUS.
Mar 10, 2025
An organization that tracks threats to civic freedoms announced Monday that it has added the United States to its watchlist, citing the Trump administration's "unprecedented" executive orders that the group says undermine democratic institutions, rule of law, and global cooperation.
"The Trump administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society," said Mandeep Tiwana, interim co-secretary general of CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society activists and organizations, in a statement Monday.
"This is an unparalleled attack on the rule of law in the United States, not seen since the days of McCarthyism in the twentieth century. Restrictive executive orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal," Tiwana continued.
The CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist, which highlights countries where there is a serious decline in "respect for civic space," also noted declines in the status of four other countries on Monday: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan, and Serbia. Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan earned a rating of "repressed," while the watchlist considers the civic space rating of Italy and the United States to be "narrowed." Serbia earned the civic space rating of "obstructed."
"Open" is the highest ranking a country can receive, and denotes when "citizens and civil society organizations are able to organize, participate, and communicate without hindrance."
"Narrowed" is the second-highest tier rating, and countries earn this designation when people can exercise civic freedoms, including the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly, and expression, though occasionally violations of these rights occur.
Following his return to the White House, "Trump has issued at least 125 executive orders, dismantling federal policies with profound implications for human rights and the rule of law," according to the group.
Other actions that CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist highlights include: rolling back federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, implementing a widespread pause on foreign aid, taking steps to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and laying off employees there, and withdrawing from the World Health Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the Paris Climate Agreement.
"These measures come amid a broader potential curb on the freedom of association," according to the group, which points to the passage of the so-called "nonprofit killer" bill in the U.S. House of Representatives in November, 2024. If it became law, the bill would allow the Treasury Department to revoke the tax-exempt status of non-profits it deems to be supporting terrorism.
The group points to Trump's January 30 executive order which is purportedly aimed at combating antisemitism. In an accompanying fact sheet with the order, Trump is quoted saying: "To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before."
Critics had warned that the executive order could chill political speech on campuses, according to The Guardian, and it is freshly in the news after Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment on Columbia University's campus.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said described Khalil's arrest as being "in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting antisemitism," according to The Associated Press.
The group also highlighted recent actions that touch on press freedom concerns. For example, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced in February that the administration will now decide which outlets get to participate in the presidential press pool, in a break with precedent.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Violence Against Guantánamo Detainees, Again
Immigrant prisoners are isolated and mistreated in what a post-9/11 lawyer called a "lawless enclave."
Mar 05, 2025
Just weeks after the Trump administration began sending immigration detainees to Guantánamo, the detainees report windowless solitary confinement for up to 23-hours-a-day; denial of drinking water as a form of punishment or retaliation; verbal and psychological abuse, including guards "threatening to shoot detainees"; and "never [being] permitted to contact family members."
These allegations are from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on March 1 to prevent new transfers to the offshore prison. The mistreatment is not surprising.
In 1991, U.S. military personnel dressed in riot gear and carrying "rifles with fixed bayonets" attacked Haitian asylum-seekers at Guantánamo—while the Haitians were sleeping.
ICE detention has long aspired to the lawlessness which Guantánamo makes possible.
That's according to an official military history of the detention of thousands of Haitians at the U.S. Naval Station in Cuba. Some of the Haitians had protested delays in their cases, as well as their mistreatment in U.S. custody, after fleeing U.S.-sponsored political violence in their country.
"The stunned migrants offered no resistance," writes the Marine Corps historian in his account of this "humanitarian mission."
In 1993, an American soldier at Guantánamo was angered when a Haitian child urinated in the dirt. The soldier "took the little boy's hand and rubbed it in the urine and mud, and then wiped it in his face and in his mouth," according to a fellow service member who later spoke to documentary filmmakers about his refusal to violently suppress nonviolent protests (see Crowing Rooster Arts, Guantánamo Notes, at 21:29).
In 1995, Haitian children unaccompanied by adults reported being "cracked" by U.S. military guards at Guantánamo: "their hands cuffed behind their back, their feet cuffed and then stepped on... The cuffings often occur[ed] in conjunction with other punishments, such as... being forced to kneel for hours on hot cement or beds of ants," according to the newspaper Haïti Progres.
After a 15-year-old Haitian girl threw food on another girl's bed, American soldiers handcuffed her to a cot in solitary confinement for a day-and-a-half, the girl told a visiting attorney. (You can read more about those imprisoned Haitian children in this pamphlet, published as part of "Ghosts of Guantánamo," a 1995 exhibit in Miami Beach organized to bring attention to those children in a time before social media.)
A brigadier general who acknowledged these incidents said they were not "abuse" but merely the result of "poor judgment and improper disciplinary techniques." A press release from the U.S. Atlantic Command said that the "conduct" of the military was being "closely monitored" by the U.S. immigration service.
Today, as the U.S. military collaborates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Guantánamo, "degrading conditions and extreme isolation have led to several suicide attempts," according to the ACLU.
Remember that these "administrative detainees" are being held for alleged civil violations, and their past crimes are either exaggerated or non-existent.
The conflation of "immigrant" and "criminal" by anti-immigrant movements preceded the Trump administration by decades, of course, but the Trump-Vance campaign took mere lies to a new level, claiming outright that even legal immigrants are "illegal." On January 28, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt picked up the line, saying that all undocumented immigrants are criminals. (That's not true, either.) Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth parroted the slogan that the immigration detainees sent to Guantánamo are the "worst of the worst." The phrase was popularized by former Vice President Dick Cheney in his justification for sending post-September-11 prisoners to the U.S. base in Cuba, and it was misinformation then, too.
So what is the real point of Guantánamo detentions?
In the 2004 Supreme Court arguments in Rasul v. Bush, concerning the post-9/11 detainees, attorney John Gibbons called the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo a "lawless enclave." That lawlessness had already been tested on the immigration prisoners. It's now more widely understood that the point of imprisoning Haitians—and others, including Cubans and Chinese—in offshore camps on foreign territory controlled by the U.S. was to keep them isolated from the U.S. justice system. Attorney Gibbons was referring to this lack of access to courts and due process.
ICE detention has long aspired to the lawlessness which Guantánamo makes possible. That's part of what the oft-quoted "taking the shackles off" of ICE really means, and it's why the Trump administration has ordered legal organizations to stop helping detained noncitizens within the U.S. even to understand the laws they're accused of breaking, much less to know their own rights under the law. (That order has been blocked by a federal judge for now.)
It's also worth remembering, with all the propaganda about borders and invasion, that the executive's backwards rationale for its claim to unlimited detention authority in Cuba has been that the U.S. is holding the prisoners outside U.S. borders. But Escalona v. Noem, the ACLU lawsuit, argues that the very transfer of immigration detainees from the U.S. to Cuba is illegal under U.S. immigration law. (The 1990s immigration detainees at Guantánamo had been picked up at sea, not transferred from the mainland U.S.)
At Guantánamo, as in ICE detention centers here, the lawlessness of procedure and the brutality of daily mistreatment are part of the same fabric. Isolating the detained persons—from lawyers, family, and the media—is crucial to that project. Trying to break the prisoners' isolation is therefore paramount.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular