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Judicial capture

The War on Counsel: Retaliatory Debarment of Law Firms

Active enforcement
Case Dossier JUD-LAW-003
STATUS
Active enforcement
SEVERITY
Critical
DATE
2025-03-14
DOMAIN
Judicial Capture
SUBDOMAIN
Defense Bar
CAPTURE VECTOR
Retaliatory debarment
TAGS
lawfare sixth-amendment retribution paul-weiss perkins-coie legal-profession
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President Trump signs executive orders stripping security clearances and federal contracts from major law firms (Paul, Weiss; Perkins Coie) as retribution for their past representation of his political opponents, threatening the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

Summary

On March 14, 2025, President Trump escalated his assault on the legal profession by targeting the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. The executive order suspended security clearances for the firm’s employees and barred them from government buildings. The explicit justification was the firm’s association with Mark F. Pomerantz (a former partner who investigated Trump) and its work on January 6th cases. This follows similar attacks on Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling.

Capture Mechanism: The Chilling of the Bar

This represents a structural attack on the adversarial legal system.

  • Collective Punishment: The regime is punishing entire firms (thousands of employees) for the actions of individual lawyers who represented the President’s rivals or investigators.
  • Denial of Counsel: By making it economically suicidal for major firms to represent anti-regime clients, the administration ensures that its opponents cannot secure competent legal defense. As Federal Judge Beryl Howell noted regarding the Perkins Coie order, the rationale sends “little chills down my spine.”

Analysis

This vector moves beyond “packing the courts” to dismantling the bar. If lawyers cannot represent the opposition without losing their livelihoods and security clearances, the legal system ceases to function as a check on power and becomes a tool of unilateral enforcement.