I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 13 minutes.

Reminder.

We’re back to our regularly scheduled programming this week, which means we’ll be releasing members-only content on Friday and Sunday. Friday editions include deep dives on reader-requested content, personal opinion pieces, interviews, and originally reported stories. Our Sunday newsletter is a round-up from the week plus cartoons, reader feedback, reader-submitted essays, and all the best stuff from the web we couldn’t fit in the week’s newsletters.  

Quick hits.

1. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the transfer of 17 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang from Guantanamo Bay to El Salvador. All of the individuals had deportation orders or final orders of removal, and their transfers were done under traditional removal authority (Title 8) rather than the Alien Enemies Act. (The transfers)
2. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued an evacuation warning for Palestinians in the entire Rafah area in the southern Gaza Strip, signaling that the military was preparing to resume its ground operation in the area. The order is the largest issued by the IDF since its offensive against Hamas resumed in March. (The warning)
3. The Trump administration announced a review of roughly $9 billion in federal contracts and grant commitments with Harvard University. The review will primarily assess whether Harvard has failed to protect students from antisemitic discrimination on campus. (The review)
4. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether charities run by religious groups have to pay unemployment taxes for their workers. The court appeared likely to side with a Catholic charity that brought the case and argued that it should not be required to pay unemployment taxes because its work is motivated by religious beliefs, and the state exempts religious groups from the tax. (The case)
5. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally party, was found guilty of embezzlement and barred from running for public office for five years. Le Pen had been considered a leading candidate in France’s 2027 presidential election. (The verdict)

Today's topic.

Trump’s executive orders on law firms. Beginning in February, President Donald Trump issued a series of orders targeting law firms that he claims have engaged in “conduct detrimental to critical American interests.” The firms named in the orders — Covington & Burling, Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale — have previously represented clients or hired lawyers that opposed Trump and his administration. Several firms have brought lawsuits to challenge the executive actions, while others have sought deals with the White House. 

On February 25, President Trump issued a memorandum instructing the attorney general to “suspend any active security clearances” held by the firm Covington & Burling and directing all federal agencies to review existing contracts with Covington & Burling for potential termination. Trump cited the firm’s work with former special counsel Jack Smith, who brought criminal charges against Trump after his first term, as the basis for the order. 

On March 6, Trump issued an executive order that also suspended security clearances for members of the firm Perkins Coie and called for a review of their federal contracts. Additionally, the order barred the firm’s lawyers from entering federal buildings and otherwise engaging with the government. Perkins Coie represented Hillary Clinton in her 2016 presidential campaign and partially funded opposition research into then-candidate Trump that led to the publishing of a dossier of unsubstantiated allegations about his campaign’s relationship with Russia. 

Separately, a March 14 order enacted similar measures against the firm Paul Weiss. Trump cited the firm’s relationship to Mark Pomerantz, who worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's office when it prosecuted Trump for falsifying business records, as the basis for the order, as well as its pro bono work on cases related to the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol. 

On March 25 and 27, Trump issued similar orders against the firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, respectively. The president said Jenner & Block’s hiring of Andrew Weissmann, who worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged connections to Russia, was part of a series of “activities that undermine justice and the interests of the United States.” Trump claimed that WilmerHale’s employment of Mueller and members of his team demonstrated its efforts to “weaponize the prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process and distort justice.”

In addition to these specific orders, Trump issued a memorandum on March 22 that threatened similar action against firms and lawyers engaged in “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States,” as determined by the attorney general. 

The firms targeted by these actions have responded in disparate ways. On March 21, Trump announced that the White House had reached a deal with Paul Weiss to restore its federal contracts and employee security clearances in return for acknowledging “wrongdoing” by its former employee Pomerantz and committing to $40 million in pro bono legal services on behalf of the Trump administration in areas focused on veterans issues, countering antisemitism, and fairness in the justice system. Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, wrote in a letter to the firm that the order represented an “existential crisis” to its future as justification for making a deal. 

On Friday, Trump announced a similar deal with the firm Skadden — which was reportedly the subject of a forthcoming order — that included $100 million in pro bono work for causes backed by the Trump administration. 

Conversely, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale have sued to challenge the orders, arguing they are unconstitutional, retaliatory actions. On March 12, a federal judge blocked portions of the order targeting Perkins Coie, saying it would have a chilling effect on firms “representing clients or advancing views unfavorable to the administration.” On Friday, two other judges temporarily blocked portions of the orders on Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, though some aspects (such as the revocation of security clearances) were allowed to remain in place. 

Today, we’ll share arguments from the left and right on the orders and the response from targeted firms. Then, my take. 

What the left is saying.

• The left is critical of the orders and suggest Trump is not even attempting to disguise his campaign of retribution.
• Some urge the targeted firms and their competitors to fight back against Trump’s attacks.
• Others note the growing cracks in the U.S. legal system.

In Vox, Ian Millhiser called the orders “the cockiest thing Trump has done so far.”

“All nine of the Supreme Court justices are lawyers. All of them have friends and law school classmates in private practice. All of them sit at the apex of a legal system that depends on lawyers to brief judges on the matters those judges must decide,” Millhiser wrote. “So it’s hard to imagine a presidential action that is more likely to antagonize the justices President Donald Trump needs to uphold his agenda, not to mention every other federal judge who isn’t already in the tank for MAGA, than a series of executive orders Trump has recently issued.”

“The striking thing about all the law firm executive orders is that they barely even attempt to justify Trump’s decision with a legitimate explanation for why these orders are lawful… The sanctions laid out in these orders, moreover, are extraordinary. They attempt to bar the firms’ attorneys and staff from federal buildings, [and] preventing lawyers representing criminal defendants from engaging in plea bargaining with federal prosecutors,” Millhiser said. Trump “is claiming the power to exterminate multi-billion dollar businesses, with over a thousand lawyers and as many support staff, to punish them for things as innocuous as representing a Democrat in 2016.”

In MSNBC, Ray Brescia argued “if law firms fight back against Trump’s attacks, they’ll win.”

“Clients and lawyers must band together against these blatantly illegal actions by the Trump administration and flip the script: They need not defend their own actions but, rather, force government attorneys who may seek to punish the clients of any ‘disfavored’ law firms to justify such unconstitutional efforts, which will be impossible to do,” Brescia wrote. “So far, the president has targeted five private law firms and the clients they represent, claiming that his administration will punish those clients who have the temerity to do business with those firms. Two of these firms, Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps, have capitulated to this pressure, expressing fears that the president’s attacks threaten their business model.

“This fear is certainly real, but if the president can scare clients away from the firms that might take positions against his administration, there will be fewer and fewer lawyers willing to take such stands. If that happens, our system of rights, protected by law, and not dispensed at the fiat of the executive, will crumble,” Brescia said. “It is in everyone’s best interest — even those clients who might fear retaliation from the Trump administration for retaining disfavored firms — to condemn the president’s efforts to attack members of the legal profession simply for playing their essential role in our legal system. These clients should stand by their lawyers and those lawyers must turn the tables on their opponents.”

In The Hill, Jay Edelson said “partisan warfare is pushing the American legal system toward collapse.”

“As a center-left lawyer who has spent his career fighting powerful interests on behalf of everyday people, I find the current moment deeply alarming. Ironically, despite my skepticism of Big Law, the first line of defense is going to be these large firms, on whom we now must rely to protect both themselves and, by extension, the legal system as a whole from many of the powerful interests it has historically served,” Edelson wrote. “Yet conservatives rightly note these developments didn’t emerge spontaneously. Many of my friends on the left seem unaware of the backdrop that Trump’s supporters and allies point to in justifying or contextualizing his administration’s actions. Conservative judges have faced relentless personal attacks that go beyond legitimate criticism.”

“I’m not arguing moral equivalence. Trump’s recent actions represent a unique threat that is pushing us perilously close to a breaking point. Still, the left’s dominance in media and elite institutions, sometimes focused like sunlight through a magnifying glass, has real-world consequences,” Edelson wrote. “But passionately advocating against systemic issues or flawed judicial decisions differs fundamentally from personal attacks on judges. Blacklisting lawyers or firms simply for representing clients or causes we oppose politically undermines the adversarial process critical to our legal system.”

What the right is saying.

• The right is mixed on the orders, though many say the firms brought this backlash on themselves. 
• Some suggest that Trump retains the upper hand even as his orders face legal challenges.
• Others say the orders are wrong on principle alone.

The New York Post editorial board said “bring the hammer down on Perkins Coie and every other player in the Russigate scandal.”

“President Donald Trump has ordered the suspension of security clearances for employees at Perkins Coie, the shady Dem superfirm whose lawyers played a key role in setting up the Steele Dossier and undermining the results of the 2016 election. This is long overdue, as is the termination of federal contracts with the firm,” the board wrote. “Trump-haters in the American intel community and Justice Department then used this garbage to justify probes of Trump, with allegations fed anonymously to our disinformation-loving leftist media, who duly trumpeted it to create a Trump-crippling Washington frenzy.”

“This was an attempted coup, albeit a bloodless one. It failed to remove the sitting president, but it did massively hamper his agenda during his first term. And Perkins Coie has no business being anywhere near government info that requires any type of clearance to access,” the board said. “It’s yet another reminder of how the powerful spent most of the past decade conspiring against the people — and why Trump’s whole-of-government effort to reform the FBI and fight back against the wider intelligence community are justified and necessary.”

In RedState, streiff wrote about the firms that have decided to make “peace with Trump.”

“Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block have all sued and obtained partial temporary restraining orders. I would submit they have just achieved counterproductive and ephemeral victories for the sake of the Resistance,” streiff said. “The bottom line is that law is a business, and businesses require clients. No matter what any court rules, Trump has the power to set the rules around granting security clearances and access to classified information. Some of the targeted law firms seem to have had on-site sensitive compartmented information facilities, which would have required federal staff to manage them. Federal agencies can legitimately refuse to contract with any of these firms for services because they are neither cheap nor uniquely qualified to do any work. 

“Companies with business before the federal government might rightfully assume that being represented by a proscribed law firm is not a great tactical move. They might also assume that hiring a law firm currently battling the administration in court might cause them more problems than it is worth,” streiff wrote. “When Paul Weiss folded like a cheap suit, its chairman Brad Karp emailed the law firm. In it, he spelled out why Paul Weiss, and now Skadden Arps, settled and why the firms engaged in performative legal challenges will also settle. At least for the next four years, these huge law firms will not be the focal point for lawfare against the administration and people associated with President Trump.”

In National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy argued “Trump’s executive order targeting Perkins Coie must be condemned.”

“I’d prefer to ignore the EO because the Democrats and their base supporters now expressing outrage over it are hypocrites… But the point isn’t to reform what can’t be reformed. It’s to do what’s right for its own sake and — if you’re lucky — to convince the convincible that we can trust each other to do the right thing, regardless of which ‘side’ has done the wrong thing,” McCarthy said. “The defamatory hardball played by Trump’s political opponents was appalling. Trump is right to believe that it should have been covered and adjudged a scandal of Watergate dimension (rather than casually set aside by the media once the allegations were shown to be a smear).

“Trump is stubbornly wrong, however, in refusing to accept that the payback he gets — extraordinary payback, but the only legitimate payback — is his stunning political comeback. The Democrats suffered thunderous defeat, in large part because the public saw these and other lawfare abuses as scandalous,” McCarthy wrote. “Revenge for a more fit man would be to revel in winning the presidency against all odds and try to be a good president for everyone — thus proving his critics wrong. Trump, by contrast, seems determined to prove his critics right by exploiting the awesome might of the presidency to destroy his enemies, just as they tried to destroy him.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• These orders undermine several key principles of the U.S. legal system.
• Trump has some legitimate grievances against individual attorneys, but punishing entire firms is nonsensical and likely illegal. 
• The impact of these orders is already being constrained by the courts. 

Free, democratic societies rest on several key principles; one is that everyone is entitled to representation in our legal system. Lawyers should not have to worry about being punished by the government for taking up particular clients. Similarly, a private citizen shouldn’t have to worry about seeking counsel from a specific firm because that firm may be on the government’s naughty list. 

President Trump’s actions here, for obvious reasons, put these principles at risk. The president is making little effort to disguise these actions as anything but a revenge tour against lawyers and prosecutors who targeted him in the Mueller investigation, during the 2016 campaign, over January 6, or through the Stormy Daniels case. If he is targeting specific law firms for taking up work he deems offensive, and they are bending the knee, then one can presume that in the immediate future, these same firms will resist taking up specific clients who they fear might anger the president. It’s easy to imagine a situation where the Trump administration targets a private U.S. citizen, and that citizen seeks out counsel from one of these major firms only to find that their options for representation are limited because the firms fear reprisal from Trump. This is, obviously, dangerous.

The entire affair also feels somewhat nonsensical. Take one illustrative example: Trump’s order targeting the law firm Paul Weiss. The order is based, in part, on the firm’s employment of attorney Mark Pomerantz. Pomerantz left the firm in 2021 to work as an unpaid special counsel in Alvin Bragg’s pursuit of Trump. I was a regular critic of Bragg’s case against Trump, which used a novel and flimsy legal theory to convict the former president. I certainly understand why Trump may hold a grudge against Pomerantz, who didn’t just pursue him in the courts but also through the media, and whose pro bono work for the Manhattan District Attorney raised all kinds of ethical questions. 

Yet Pomerantz left Paul Weiss in order to work for Bragg. Trump is now punishing an entire firm of thousands of lawyers and employees in part to get payback against a single lawyer. National Review’s Dan McLaughlin made a reasonable case that sanctioning Pomerantz would have been a fair pursuit, but going after the entire law firm is unfair and overkill. 

The plainly retributive nature of Trump’s actions has also prompted a confounding response from some on the left, who are playing directly into Trump’s framing of these firms as somehow on their team. But as Ankush Khardori, a Politico columnist and former Paul Weiss attorney, notes, that isn’t really the case. 

Khardori points out that: 1) The firms targeted in Trump’s orders are hardly paragons of progressivism or liberal ideals. They are major corporate organizations trying to maximize profits and find wealthy, corporate clients to defend. They are bending the knee because their profits are threatened — it’s not that complicated. 2) The pro bono work these firms do for liberal causes is a tiny fraction of their operations, and Trump seems to be targeting them in part because of their work on immigration cases. 3) Elite law firms generally try to avoid the appearance of political bias because it’s bad for business, and several of these larger firms have lawyers who worked in the first Trump administration. 

Khardori was also surprisingly nonchalant about the whole affair. Like me, he expressed worries about what it means in a democratic society when lawyers fear reprisal from the government for serving certain clients. But he also closed by saying this: 

The firms that we are talking about — particularly the ones that settled with Trump — are some of the most successful firms in the world, and they work for a very small segment of American society. Most people and even most businesses cannot afford the rates that these firms charge, so they go to local practitioners or smaller firms for their occasional legal needs. In that sense, the practical fallout might be relatively modest.

I think this is basically right. It’s hard — if not impossible — to measure how this targeting will impact the decisions of law firms across the country. But the immediate and practical threat of these firms promising pro bono work as part of a pseudo-settlement with Trump is less about who will or won’t get representation, and more about the symbolism of these powerful firms caving to the president in the face of pressure we should all hope they’d resist. 

That part is equal parts frightening and disappointing — but, like a lot of Trump’s executive actions right now, it likely won’t be lasting or all that impactful. Three firms have already sued to challenge the orders against them, and they were granted some temporary relief while the cases play out. In other words, the resistance to Trump’s actions is building while the White House is reportedly winding down the effort anyway, so we may have seen this campaign hit its peak. 

So, yes, while he may have gotten some temporary “wins” here, it seems just as likely that he could have antagonized these firms — and even the Supreme Court — in a way that undermines his administration over the long term.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: Can you expound on the possible benefits to Russia if Trump signs a mineral rights deal with Ukraine?

— Ann from Fort Collins, CO

Tangle: The conventional read of the U.S. reaching a mineral-rights deal with Ukraine is that it is an outcome Russia would not want. Instead, the U.S. having a material interest in Ukraine would act as a deterrent to any future Russian aggression because the U.S. would have an incentive to maintain peace and order to protect its assets. It would not apply any benefit to Russia, other than being a softer U.S. commitment to Ukraine relative to other potential compacts: pledging to share intelligence or weaponry or supporting Ukraine’s NATO membership, which would pledge U.S. military support (along with Canada and much of Europe) to defend Ukraine’s borders.

That’s the conventional read, it’s the one we subscribe to, and it’s what we wrote in our edition on a mineral-rights deal a few weeks ago. However, there’s an alternative take that’s worth exploring.

It’s also possible that Putin wants the terms of that deal to be laid out so that Russia can outbid Ukraine. Then, Putin can tell Trump that as a means of securing peace in the war, Russia will give the U.S. access to rare earth minerals in Russia and in the “disputed territories” — implying, of course, that the U.S. would be granted rights in Ukraine’s eastern territories by Russia if the U.S. agrees they are Russia’s to control. 

To put it simply, if the U.S. gets rights in Ukrainian territory, it would be a significant check on Russia; if Putin leverages those discussions to his benefit, it could go the other way in a hurry. Either way, with Trump’s famously hard-to-read foreign policy postures, the peace talks now underway are worth keeping a close eye on.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order to address price gouging and other anti-competitive ticket resale practices for live events. The order directs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to more strictly enforce existing laws covering the use of “bots” by ticket scalpers to buy large quantities of tickets to popular events and then resell them at a high markup. Trump also asked the FTC to submit recommendations for additional regulation or legislation to protect consumers within 180 days. The action follows similar efforts by the Biden Justice Department to address allegedly monopolistic behavior by ticket brokers in the concert and entertainment industries. The Wall Street Journal has the story.

Numbers.

• $2.6 billion. The law firm Paul Weiss’s approximate revenue in 2024, according to Law360. 
• $130 million. The approximate value of pro bono work done annually by Paul Weiss, according to Chairman Brad Karp. 
• $40 million. The value of the pro bono work Paul Weiss agreed to provide to causes supported by the Trump administration. 
• 1,775. The number of associates at U.S. law firms who have signed an open letter condemning the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting law firms as of April 1. 
• #27, #35, #38, and #52. The ranks of Paul Weiss, Covington & Burling, WilmerHale, and Perkins Coie — four of the firms targeted by Trump’s executive orders — among the largest U.S. law firms by annual revenue, respectively, according to AmLaw.
• #6. The rank by revenue of Skadden, the firm that recently announced a deal with the Trump administration for $100 million in pro bono work.

The extras.

• One year ago today, we were on spring break and did not publish a newsletter.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the story on the rising percentage of Americans who think the country is on the right track.
• Nothing to do with politics: JPMorgan claims to have generated the world’s first “truly random” numbers.
• Yesterday’s survey: 5,531 readers answered our survey on the Signal group chat controversy, with 72% saying that mistakenly adding an Atlantic journalist to the group was a “large” national security risk. “Regardless of the party in power, this should be seen as a big deal,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

A nonprofit called Force Blue brings together veterans and marine conservation missions. The organization comprises Special Operations Forces veterans who are retrained and deployed on diverse marine missions, which include replanting coral, conducting shipwreck surveys, and laying recycled oyster shells to protect bays. The organization helps reintegrate veterans into civilian life through “mission therapy,” providing community, structure, and purpose for the retired volunteers. “In the military, we were weapons of mass destruction, but now through Force Blue, we are weapons of mass construction,” Air Force veteran Brian Gebo said. Nice News has the story.

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