In the latest installment of Trump Weaponizing the Government While Screaming About the Weaponization of the Government, the White House yanked security clearances from Covington & Burling because they represent Jack Smith. A competent administration would develop some pretext for the revocation of Covington’s security clearances to avoid allegations of vindictive retaliation. Instead, Trump signed the order declaring, “We’re going to call it the deranged Jack Smith signing or bill.”
Four-dimensional chess this ain’t.
Covington took on Smith in his personal capacity after the administration signaled that it would use the DOJ to punish the prosecutors with the temerity to pursue a criminal case against the former president for collecting boxes worth of classified documents like Pokemon. And more importantly than merely having these documents, he sent his representatives to attest that he’d turned them all back over to the government when he… hadn’t. It’s this key detail that made Trump’s case materially different than then-president Biden discovering a briefing document from his VP days, no matter what right-wing podcasters try to spin.
Mar-a-Lago club members had better access to U.S. secrets over the last four years than Covington does now. The message is that Covington lawyers need to get in line behind Vladimir Putin and any other deep-pocketed foreign power who might’ve sent agents to hang out at the club over the last four years. Priorities!
Why does Covington even need clearances? Trump already said he silently declassified everything relevant to this case with his presidential mind powers on his way out the door. Is he now saying he’s magically reclassified them?
While the immediate impetus is to prevent Smith from having access to his choice of attorneys by hobbling Covington’s ability to effectively defend him, the move undermines Covington’s capacity to do any work involving secret material [UPDATE: to clarify, others in the firm still have their clearances to the extent work is done by other lawyers at the firm — though Peter Koski and his team who work largely on “sensitive, high-stakes government” matters will not be in a position to assist with that work to the extent it involves secret material] and sends a more pronounced chilling message to the Washington legal community as a whole.
From CNN:
“This is nothing less than a petty and vindictive attack on the legal profession, and particularly the ability of a select group of cleared lawyers to defend the interests of officials across the intelligence community,” said Washington national security attorney Bradley Moss in response to the White House’s move. Moss is a law partner of Mark Zaid, who also has had his security clearance revoked. “The bigger question is, how far is he going to take this war against the legal profession, and against anyone who stands for the rule of law?”
So this is how the rule of law dies… on the gilded toilet of a tacky resort.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
