Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paid | Books

Donald Trump has stiffened his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to the tune of $2.5 million. He refused to grant him a pardon. The former mayor of New York is the target of prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia. Then again, as David Enrich of The New York Times writes in his new book, by the time Trump entered politics, his “reputation for abusing his lawyers (and banks, contractors, and clients) was well known. “. Giuliani can’t say he wasn’t warned.

In Servants of the Damned, Enrich also recounts how Trump once tried to settle a bill for nearly $2 million.

“It’s not the 1800s… You can’t pay me with a horse,” replied the anonymous lawyer.

Trump ended up coughing. It was that or another trial.

Enrich is the investigative editor of The Times. Dark Towers, his previous book, examined Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank. He also exposed the ties that unite Anthony Kennedy, the retired Supreme Court justice, to the Trump family. Kennedy’s son once worked at the bank. Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced Kennedy on the court, once served as the judge’s clerk.

Servants of the Damned is instructive and disturbing. In an unflattering portrait of the rise of big law firms, giant law firms that span the globe, Enrich settles down on Jones’ day. He labels other powerhouses — Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps and Baker McKenzie — for moral failings, but repeatedly directs his gaze to Cleveland-based Jones Day. He represented Trump.

Whether the intensity of Enrich’s disdain is deserved is debatable. Lawyers are held in lower esteem by the public than auto mechanics, nursing home operators, bankers and local politicians. On the other hand, lawyers do better than journalists. Beyond that, the canons of the bar require lawyers to diligently represent their clients. Concern for reputation and the ease or difficulty of recruiting new talent and new clients are often more powerful constraints than wiggling fingers.

As of 2015, Jones Day was the outside advocate for the Trump campaign – which Enrich treats as an indelible stain. Nearly six years later, he writes, the rooftop of Jones Day’s Washington office offered “a splendid view of a violent mob storming the Capitol.”

The insurrection, says Enrich, was the “foreseeable culmination of a president that Jones Day had helped elect, an administration that the firm’s lawyers had helped run, and an election that the firm had helped erode. integrity”.

Jones Day was not Trump’s post-election lawyer, but Enrich assigns guilt. In the aftermath of the 2020 vote, a Trump White House insider lamented to the Guardian that Jones Day wrongly walked away from Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat. The campaign brought in millions at Jones Day. Gratitude and support, the insider said, were in order.

Jones Day attorneys marbled the administration. Conservative bar partner and stalwart Don McGahn was Trump’s first White House attorney. Trump named Noel Francisco Solicitor General. Eric Dreiband headed the civil rights division at the Justice Department. All three are back at Jones Day. The revolving door is real.

McGahn played a vital role in filling the federal bench with conservative judges who had the endorsement of the Federalist Society. He presided over a revolution, of sorts. Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed abortion rights, is in tatters.

But when McGahn refused to cross the proverbial line during the Russia inquiry, Trump soured on him. McGahn took and kept notes – much to Trump’s dismay. McGahn resigned in the fall of 2018. The following spring, Trump tweeted, “McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than [Robert] Muller. Never a big fan!”

Enrich also sheds light on the unrest caused by Trump within Jones Day, particularly among lawyers who have identified as mainstream Republicans. In 2014, Ben Ginsberg and McGahn arrived from another DC law firm. Ginsberg had sterling GOP credentials. He had worked at the top of the White House campaigns of George W Bush and Mitt Romney. Enrich describes his office as “a sanctuary from the old Republican Party.”

But in the 2020 cycle, Ginsberg felt uneasy about the direction of Trump’s re-election bid. He called the president’s rhetoric “out of reach.” At the end of August, he resigned. Days later, he wrote a blunt column in The Washington Post attacking Trump for pushing the widespread voter fraud lie and denying mail-in voting.

“The president’s rhetoric,” he said, “has put my party in the position of a firefighter deliberately setting fires to look like a hero putting them out.” Republicans “risk undermining the fundamental tenet of our democracy: that all eligible voters should be allowed to vote. If that happens, Americans will rightly make the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.

Days before the election, Ginsberg warned that his party was “destroying itself on Trump’s altar.”

Then there was Donald Ayer, deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George HW Bush. After a clash with then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, Ayer resigned. Bill Barr was his replacement. Ayer returned to Jones Day. In the fall of 2016, Ayer publicly voiced his opposition to Trump. In 2018, he retired. Ahead of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, Ayer told Enrich Jones Day “should have gotten off the wagon, because [Trump] is a scoundrel”.

But in 2020, according to Open Secrets, the company brought in more than $19.2 million in federal campaign spending. Trump was a golden ticket.

Jones Day has become a “go-to business for Republicans, both mainstream and fringe,” as Enrich puts it. With sneakers, vodka and computers, brand image matters. Law firms are a little different. In that light, Servants of the Damned is as much a rebuke of big business as it is an indictment of Trump’s Republican Party.

Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice is published in the United States by HarperCollins

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