Watch the entire thing, and think of the richest man in the world doing Trump's dirty work because it further enriches himself, too. Think about it. But never forget, he is not the architect. He's the guy with the chain saw. The architect of your hurt is TRUMP. Do not lose sight of the might. Trump is letting Musk drive the car.
But TRUMP is telling him where the car is to go.
And one firm is suing while another is boot licking.
Whichever firm prevails and how it does so, the action of Trump is offensive to all norms of fair play. Also, it breaches areas of judicial action, infringing upon the powers of another of the three branches of federal organization, the judiciary.
It is unacceptable Executive hubris, but is being accepted and accommodated by at least one of the massive white shoe law firms that dominate major litigation and legal services provided big and powerful clients in our nation.
It is usurpation of powers never contemplated by the founders of the nation, who wrote the Constitution as they did to maintain the three branches in tension each with the other two. This is an Executive on steroids in attack against our Constitutional system, and to have one major nationwide law firm embrace the mischief is shameful.
Detail -
There is much on the internet about the situation. Trump's enemy list controls which firms are being jumped, while earlier in things, March 17, it was noted the Jones Day firm, a Trump and Republican friendly firm, got a free pass.
As to where things today stand, a single source will be cited, but again, the web is in full force in attending to the story, so other outlets' coverage can easily be found by simple web search.
The Mertens spouses at Wall Street on Parade, write:
Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2025 ~
The New York Times’ Sunday, March 23 newspaper featured a lead story on how the 1,000-lawyer Big Law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a Wall Street favorite, had caved to threats in a Presidential Action from Donald Trump, which would have banned lawyers at the firm from entering federal buildings; from reviewing classified documents for their clients by stripping them of security clearance; and effectively blacklisting the firm as a member of Donald Trump’s enemy list.
The Chair of Paul Weiss, Brad Karp, negotiated with Trump and got the order rescinded by agreeing to spend $40 million in pro bono work on projects amenable to Trump — along with other subservient concessions.
Trump’s move against Paul Weiss followed his similar actions against Big Law firms Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling. Unlike Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie hired another Big Law firm, Williams & Connolly to represent it, and filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration. As a bold symbol that it would not be intimidated by Trump’s revenge tour, Williams & Connolly listed 14 of its lawyers by name on the court filing as counsel to Perkins Coie.
Pertinent sections of the lawsuit read as follows:
“This case concerns an Executive Order issued on March 6, 2025, entitled, ‘Addressing Risks From Perkins Coie LLP’ (‘the Order’). The Order is an affront to the Constitution and our adversarial system of justice. Its plain purpose is to bully those who advocate points of view that the President perceives as adverse to the views of his Administration, whether those views are presented on behalf of paying or pro bono clients. Perkins Coie brings this case reluctantly. The firm is comprised of lawyers who advocate for clients; its attorneys and employees are not activists or partisans. But Perkins Coie’s ability to represent the interests of its clients—and its ability to operate as a legal-services business at all—are under direct and imminent threat. Perkins Coie cannot allow its clients to be bullied. The firm is committed to a resolute defense of the rule of law, without regard to party or ideology, and therefore brings this lawsuit to declare the Order unlawful and to enjoin its implementation…
“The Order imposes these punishments as retaliation for the firm’s association with, and representation of, clients that the President perceives as his political opponents. Many law firms represented candidates, parties, and related political committees and organizations in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns. But the Order targets only one firm—Perkins Coie—because the President views it, more than any other firm, as aligned with the Democratic Party by reason of its representation of the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign and its successful handling of challenges brought by the Trump campaign seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as victories the firm won for its clients in a significant number of voting rights cases, including cases where Perkins Coie succeeded in upholding existing laws, in connection with the 2020 election.”
That Trump’s lawyers lost repeatedly to Perkins Coie lawyers in his court attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election, would appear to be one of the prime motivators of his unprecedented attack on the firm using the imprimatur of the Oval Office.
Perkins Coie with Williams & Connolly as its counsel decided to fight Donald Trump’s intimidation tactics to crush all perceived roadblocks to enforcing his authoritarian agenda. Paul Weiss, on the other hand, caved quickly.
Paul Weiss has likely done far more damage to its reputation by licking Trump’s jack boots than Trump could have inflicted on the law firm over the long-term. The firm was widely ridiculed for its capitulation by conservatives, progressives and even a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, wrote this on a Cato blog:
“What is clear is that Trump himself believes that his threats have caused a prominent law firm to back down on vital principles of independence and that he has used the powers of the presidency to gratify his wish for revenge against a particular lawyer for having fought him in court. [.,.]
[...]
Indeed, Trump was emboldened. After Paul Weiss was shamed widely in the media on Saturday for its capitulation, Trump doubled down on Sunday, issuing a breathtaking authoritarian memorandum to his U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, who has been elevated by Trump from representing him personally as one of his defense counsel in his first impeachment proceeding, to the highest law enforcement officer in the U.S., who is now tasked with carrying out Trump’s revenge against his perceived enemies. The memorandum also went to Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who proved she was cruel enough to serve in the Trump cabinet by admitting in her 2024 book to shooting to death the family puppy as an expedient means of dealing with an unruly pet.
Trump’s Sunday memorandum threatens retaliatory measures against lawyers and/or law firms that engage in lawsuits against the Trump administration as it shreds the U.S. Constitution.
As of March 15, the website JustSecurity.org listed 135 lawsuits that have been filed against the Trump administration for overstepping its legal and/or constitutional authority.
There is more so again the Mertens' link is here, and the excerpt has already been lengthy because facts matter. The Mertens, in turn, link to the Perkins Coie complaint (a 43p pdf online item), quoting here initial complaint paragraphs:
WHAT THIS CASE IS ABOUT
1. This case concerns an Executive Order issued on March 6, 2025, entitled, “Addressing Risks From Perkins Coie LLP” (“the Order”). The Order is an affront to the Constitution and our adversarial system of justice. Its plain purpose is to bully those who advocate points of view that the President perceives as adverse to the views of his Administration, whether those views are presented on behalf of paying or pro bono clients. Perkins Coie brings this case reluctantly. The firm is comprised of lawyers who advocate for clients; its attorneys and employees are not activists or partisans. But Perkins Coie’s ability to represent the interests of its clients—and its ability to operate as a legal-services business at all—are under direct and imminent threat. Perkins Coie cannot allow its clients to be bullied. The firm is committed to a resolute defense of the rule of law, without regard to party or ideology, and therefore brings this lawsuit to declare the Order unlawful and to enjoin its implementation.
2. The Order’s peculiar title betrays its oddity as an Executive Order, for its purpose is not executive in nature. Rather, the Order reflects a purpose that is judicial—to adjudicate whether a handful of lawyers at Perkins Coie LLP (“Perkins Coie,” “the law firm,” or “the firm”) engaged in misconduct in the course of litigation and then to punish them by: (1) terminating government contracts with firm clients, thereby driving away current and prospective clients; (2) denying all members and employees of the firm access to federal buildings and meetings or other engagement with federal employees; and (3) immediately suspending, and possibly revoking, security clearances for all firm employees.
3, The Order imposes these punishments on the entire law firm even though the attorneys involved in the purported misconduct numbered a mere handful of the more than 1,200 attorneys in the firm, and even though the two attorneys the Order appears to target have not been
with the firm for years.
4. The Order imposes these punishments ex post facto—the President having already supposedly adjudicated the matters—determining that Perkins Coie engaged in “dishonest and dangerous activity,” “manufactured” evidence in connection with the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, engaged in “a pattern” of “egregious activity” by challenging (and defending) election laws, and “racially discriminated against” its employees and applicants, all without giving notice to Perkins Coie and without giving Perkins Coie an opportunity to be heard and contest these and other false and disparaging claims made in the Order.
5. The Order imposes these punishments as retaliation for the firm’s association with, and representation of, clients that the President perceives as his political opponents. Many law firms represented candidates, parties, and related political committees and organizations in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns. But the Order targets only one firm—Perkins Coie—because the President views it, more than any other firm, as aligned with the Democratic Party by reason of its representation of the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign and its successful handling of challenges brought by the Trump campaign seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as victories the firm won for its clients in a significant number of voting rights cases, including cases where Perkins Coie succeeded in upholding existing laws, in connection with the 2020 election.
6. During the campaign, the President promised to retaliate against his political opponents, including the attorneys who represented them (“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law…. Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers….”). And, in signing the Order, he insisted that Perkins Coie engaged in weaponization “against a political opponent” (i.e., himself) and justified the Order for the chilling effect it would have (“it should never be allowed to happen again”).
7. The retaliatory aim of the Order is intentionally obvious to the general public and the press because the very goal is to chill future lawyers from representing particular clients. The Associated Press wrote that “the actions appear designed not only to settle scores from years past but also to deter both government officials and private sector workers from participating in new inquiries into his conduct.” And that aim is also obvious to the profession, many of whom will only comment anonymously, as Law.com reported (“most law firm leaders are choosing to stay anonymous when speaking about the administration’s orders”).
8. The principal claims made by the Order have already been raised in the proper forum and resolved by the branch of government with constitutional authority to do so. Regarding the claim that the firm engaged in misconduct in connection with its representation of the Clinton campaign, the President filed a federal court lawsuit in March 2022 against Perkins Coie, Hillary Clinton, and others. That lawsuit asserted RICO claims concerning the campaign and allegedly falsified documents. The district court dismissed that lawsuit in September 2022. Regarding the assertion that the firm “pushed” false claims about ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, a Special Counsel appointed during the first Trump Administration indicted Michael Sussmann, a former partner of the firm, in connection with evidence he brought to the attention of the FBI, allegedly without disclosing his ties to the Clinton campaign. That case went to trial in this Court in May 2022, and the jury quickly and unanimously acquitted him. Regardless, Mr. Sussmann is now at a different firm. And regarding the claim that former members of the firm were not candid with the court, the court concerned—the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — sanctioned three lawyers in 2021 by requiring them to pay $8,700 in legal fees in connection with one duplicative motion to supplement the record on appeal. None of those lawyers work for Perkins Coie today.
[...]
[doing a cut paste from pdf to hypertext reformatting might be in error]
So, the Sussmann litigation went to an appeal, and with minor change, the District Court outcome was confirmed. The judiciary had its say. Now, this. Perkins Coie deserves praise for contesting the highly offensive Trump move. Bravo, and all that.
Trying to quell opposition by "Executive Order" goes against freedom of speech, and is a shabby thing if done by anyone in the Oval Office. Never done so before, we see actions of a wholly new kind by this current administration. Judgment of things can vary, but Crabgrass opinion is clear. This is one of the most tawdry things imaginable, and it takes a Donald J. Trump to imagine it and give it a try.
Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes is short of sound Presidential behavior.
May he, the Donald of the United States, fail entirely and dramatically in this retributive crap which is wasteful of government time and energy.
_____________UPDATE____________
Separating out the concluding part of the Martins' item was an editorial choice because the item, fitting to its headline, segues into:
Trump is using similar tactics against universities by threatening them with losing federal grants, which can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars for research. Trump’s actual fear is that campus protests could accelerate exponentially from coast to coast and lead the evening news cycle, tanking his quest for authoritarian rule with little pushback. Columbia University has capitulated to Trump’s demands after being threatened with the loss of $400 million in federal funding.
Trump is also upping his threats against the media in an effort to further silence his critics. He has banned the 59-Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press from attending press conferences in the Oval Office and elsewhere, in retaliation for its failure to follow his directive about his renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Associated Press has not caved and has filed a lawsuit to challenge the restraint on its freedom of speech and freedom to choose its own words.
On March 6, while taking questions from the press in the Oval Office, the President called out by name two MSNBC news program hosts that he said “should be forced to resign.” The journalists are Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow, both of whom have doggedly connected the dots on Trump’s grifting and unsavory alignment with his largest campaign donors and with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s attack on these two specific journalists followed a more general attack on the MSNBC cable network on February 18 during a Sean Hannity interview. Five days later, Joy Reid, another MSNBC program host – and one of Trump’s key critics – learned that her program had been abruptly cancelled. (See our report: News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled.)
We have been monitoring the evening news reporting at MSNBC since our report on the cancellation of the Joy Reid program. If Trump expected his attacks to silence his on-air critics at the network, he must be furious. The program hosts have, instead, doubled down. They are now showing the thousands of Americans that are turning out for protests and anti-Trump rallies across the United States, despite it not being a national election year.
A reported 34,000 people turned out Friday night in Denver as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at their “Fight Oligarchy” nationwide tour. Sanders said it was the largest rally he had ever had, notwithstanding the massive crowds he attracted during his 2016 campaign bid for President.
The threats to their livelihoods and personal sacrifices being made by those standing up to Trump’s tyranny, makes what Paul Weiss and Columbia University did this past week all the more unconscionable. History will not be kind to the cowards. It never is.
The Mertens have tightly tied bullying shit in different venues into a single steaming pile. Or that stands as Crabgrass outlook and opinion. At any rate, praise beyond a mere hat tip seems merited. And at the start of quoting, the site's link -
https://wallstreetonparade.com/
was given. It stands as where readers might find a days-ago post about Schumer and the Paul Weiss firm, which speculates about a possible Schumer consideration in getting ten Democratic votes for the Republican House continuing resolution, beyond the judgment Crabgrass has noted that has been Schumer's general statement - that giving Trump/Musk a shut down to tamper around was a worse option than throwing a highly flawed continued resolution over the transom to let it work its ways instead of facing a shutdown of uncertain duration and Executive levels of gaming and abuse.
If Musk/DOGE wants waste and abuse to investigate, obstructive and dangerous as well as frivolous Executive Orders do exist for detailed attention and denunciation.
And yes, TESLA is involved. In Canada. Possibly okay, possibly not.
Suspicious is a good way to phrase it.
The MSM item reports:
- Disused parking lots in Canada are filled with rows of brand new Tesla EVs.
- The cars appeared after 8,600 were registered in four locations one weekend.
- The unusual spike occurred just before Canada put a hold on iZEV subsidies.
Tesla was accused by the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association (CADA) of cheating legitimate car dealers and buyers in Canada out of iZEV subsidies earlier this month. Critics have now grown even more suspicious after footage emerged of hundreds of new Tesla EVs left in disused parking lots.
Canadian media discovered huge fleets of brand new Model 3s and Model Ys languishing in the lot of an old strip mall in Toronto, conveniently located across the street from a Tesla dealership. Hundreds of miles away in Laval, Quebec, reporters founds scores more Teslas jammed into parking bays in another lot.
A staggering 8,600 cars were registered in just three days at four Tesla retail outlets in Canada, which breaks down as one car every minute, 24 hours a day for three straight days, even when the stores were closed. That kind of activity is highly unusual, but what really raised eyebrows was the timing of the sales flurry.
The sales came during a period when demand for Teslas in Canada had tanked, in part due to CEO Elon Musk’s association with President Trump, who has threatened to impose significant import tariffs and repeatedly suggested that Canada could become the USA’s 51st state. But the sales also occurred right before the country paused its iZEV electric vehicle subsidy program, leading some to suggests Tesla had gamed the system.
Since Canada is a soverign nation not wanting to be any part of the U.S., DOGE cannot get to the heart of this situation, check out databases and such.
That's probably good for the integrity of the involved databases. Contracts should exist for every legitimate TESLA sale in the Canadian nation. As well as the history of the specific VIN identified items, tariff status, etc.
Fraud, waste and abuse is the DOGE buzzword set, and now this. We live in interesting times. 43 million bucks on the table, so if fraud is there it is big time fraud, not petty, and what do we make of how Elon's cash cow behaved? This story could grow legs. Hopefully so.
FURTHER: Perhaps related; here and here. Again, lawful boycott and protest is okay. Vandalism is a crime. Arguably a hate crime, if circumstances fit.
People should not vandalize property.
Boycott, if sustained and widespread, is more effective a statement, since it is done by people willing to disclose their identity. They are not night time petty crooks not wanting their identity discovered.
Political boycott was fine in the past when the NAACP did it, and now when anti-DOGE protest reaches toward Elon's cash cow, it is political, not otherwise.
Trump fronts Elon, so the ultimate responsibility here is at the White House.
Those who appreciate moves Francis has made wish for as long a future for him atop the Roman Church as feasible. This link. It seems the longer Francis has been Pope, the better the Church has become. May his successor be an equally sound minded reformer as he has been, be the successor another South American Jesuit, or otherwise. Francis has been a positive factor in times of bad news worldwide.
Links here and here, with respect to Trump's lasting ability to find collaborators who blow smoke - this one at Social Security. A judge named Hollander calls a time out for common sense to prevail.
The first linked item [a carry of a WaPo item] begins:
Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatened Thursday evening to bar Social Security Administration employees from accessing its computer systems in response to a judge’s order blocking the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.
Less than 24 hours later — after the judge rejected his argument and the White House intervened — Dudek is saying he was “out of line.”
Dudek initially told news outlets, including in a Friday interview with the Washington Post, that the judge’s decision to bar sensitive data access to “DOGE affiliates” was overly broad and that to comply, he might have to block virtually all SSA employees from accessing the agency’s computer systems. But Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, who issued the order, said in a letter that Dudek’s assertions “were inaccurate.”
“Employees of SSA who are not involved with the DOGE Team or in the work of the DOGE Team are not subject to the Order,” Hollander wrote in the letter on Friday sent to lawyers involved in the case. “ … Moreover, any suggestion that the Order may require the delay or suspension of benefit payments is incorrect.”
In response to Hollander’s letter, Dudek said in a statement that the court clarified its guidance and “therefore, I am not shutting down the agency.”
This Social Security gaming is getting tiring and Trump should just leave elderly and other benefits alone. Cut the nastiness aimed so that billionaires can justify continued obscene lowering of their taxes by cutting government payroll and services - the cost side of tax and spend theology. It is sick what Trump is doing, while using Musk as his lightning rod and tool.