Furious Law Firm Beats Trump to a Pulp in Major Case
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Say Donald Trump is a great unifier. He brings people together.

in a way that even he couldn't anticipate. See, he's gone after law firms, one in particular named Jenner and Block. I know the firm well, know the lawyers there well, in a retaliatory move. He doesn't like the fact that Jenner and Block has taken positions against Trump and against the Trump administration. So he tried to put him onto a crap list. He tried to give them a scarlet letter, tried to

bar clients from using Jenner and Block for matters before the federal government, federal agencies, federal prosecutions, and federal courthouses.

And then another federal judge at the end of last week leading into the Memorial Day weekend, Judge Bates said no. Summary judgment, permanent injunction granted. The Trump administration has violated Jenner and Block's First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment privileges. But what is the cosmic justice that's happened? What's the unification that I was referring to at the top of this hot take?

Jenner and Block is representing Harvard University against Donald Trump. And basically in the same one week stretch in which it's got its own injunction against

I love this. I love this part. The law firm got its own injunction in its favor, blocking Donald Trump from retaliating against it. At the same time, they obtained an injunction on behalf of Harvard University to stop Donald Trump from getting rid of all of those pesky international students that Harvard University relies upon for research and for education.

Basically to support its university, it makes Harvard Harvard. Jenner and Block and Harvard together again. Of course, they're joined by another law firm, Quinn Emanuel, who also has a little bit of notoriety because one of its lawyers, William Burke, that runs the entire Quinn Emanuel firm, up until about a month ago when he was dumped by Donald Trump, his firm was the Ethics Council for the Trump Organization.

That's an oxymoron. Trump Organization and Ethics Council, those two things go together like peanut butter and sardines. All right, let's jump into what's happened. The coming together, people, fair-minded people joining together to defend each other. Lawyers and law firms who just won their own injunction getting another injunction on behalf of a client. Jenner and Block in Harvard, right here on the Midas Touch Network and Legal AF. I'm Michael Popak. While I got you, take a minute, take a receipt with you.

that you're defending democracy by going over to the Legal AF YouTube channel, boom, and hit that free subscribe button. Let's talk about it. So Judge Bates, a judge, senior status judge in the District of Columbia, D.C. federal court, he just issued on the 23rd of May, we covered it here in the Midas Touch Network, this injunction, 52 pages, a memorandum of

Now, you may recall back in April, he entered what's called the temporary restraining order. And we'll do a little teachable moment here. That's sort of moving up the food chain. You start with an administrative stay, you move to a temporary restraining order, then a preliminary injunction, then a permanent injunction.

and it generally blocks somebody from doing something negative against you or continuing to do it negative against you. Now, one of the things in the temporary restraining order mode that Judge Bates ordered the federal government and Pam Bondi in particular for the Department of Justice to do was to, as all federal judges do, was to inform the rest of the government about the existence of the temporary restraining order. You know, the government's a

big apparatus. It's gotten smaller in the last 150 days, but it still has tens of thousands of employees. And so to remove any ambiguity about the application of a federal order, the judge ordered that the Department of Justice, and Judge Bates in particular, ordered the Department of Justice inform the rest of the remaining components of the government about his temporary restraining order. Pam Bonney didn't like it. They got this thing. It's like a verbal tick. They keep calling judges

who are by their very nature unelected,

unelected federal judges, unelected federal, unelected federal judges, because they want to make that in stark contrast to Donald Trump, who, you know, to continue the narrative, the fake narrative, the mythology of Donald Trump that he's created for himself. You know, he was born in the log cabin that he himself built, you know, that kind of thing. You know, they like to say he was elected in a landslide mandate by the American people. False. You want to see a landslide mandate? Go back to FDR. Go back to Ronald Reagan, who won every state but one.

But Donald Trump, I mean, I don't want to say he just barely won, but he, you know, he won the seven battleground states. I get you. And he won the popular vote. Ooh, I got you. All right. So for that, he's like, he's elected and he's unelected. Yeah, our federal, wake up, everybody. Our federal judiciary is unelected. I know Pam Bondi plied her trade and cut her teeth down in Florida, where we have a lot of elected officials, the elected judiciary, many state court proceedings.

All the way up to the Supreme Court of a state may be elected. Some of them are appointed by the governor. That's the general way. But in Miami, for instance, Broward County, Palm Beach County, and Florida, you run to be a judge. You don't even have to be a lawyer.

And then you get elevated maybe by the governor to a district court position or an appellate court position up to the United States Supreme Court, up to the Supreme Court of that state, something like that. And that's how you move. But the federal level, you are picked by the president. Got somebody to blame? Blame this president or the past presidents. You get picked by the president, you get confirmed by the Senate, and that's how it works. So to keep calling them the unelected judiciary is ridiculous. So she issues her own memo.

which I have a copy of right here and I'll post in our Legal AF sub stack. And here's what she says. And this is more, this is a political screed masquerading as a memo and it ended up being filed back with the judge.

Subject court injunction against certain provisions of Executive Order 14246. This is about generative block. On March 28, 2025, an unelected district judge again invaded the policymaking and the free speech prerogatives of the executive branch, including requiring the attorney general and the Office of Management and Budget Director to pen a letter to the head of every executive department and agency. Local district judges lack this authority. I don't agree with that.

And nor does the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court should swiftly constrain these judges' blatant overstepping of their judicial powers. I mean, there is an issue up at the United States Supreme Court about nationwide injunctions. It was brought forward in the birthright citizenship case. We're still waiting for a ruling on that. But I assure you,

I'll bet dollars to donuts that they're not going to take away the ability of a federal judge to order that parties, including a governmental entity, give notice within the government of his injunction.

um on this in this particular case she continued a local district judge that's judge bates has mandated that the attorney general and the omb director personally send the below notification about jenner and block a law firm committed to the weaponization of justice discrimination on the basis of race rate radical gender ideology and other anti-american pursuits that is blasphemous that is defamatory and and it's

The fact that I have to talk about an attorney general from her perch attacking a law firm in America based on their diversity hiring and their success in the courtrooms is mind-boggling. So she has the whole beginning part. Of course, the judge didn't tell her to do. And then goes into, per the court order, I'm notifying you of the order, what it means.

And then she has her position statement. It remains the executive branch's position that it was necessary, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so that's her memo. So I had an old buddy from law school came to crash at my place after we had moved to Florida. I hadn't seen him in years. First thing he says is, wait, where's the cat? I thought you were a cat guy now. I was like, she's here. She's just not triggering your allergies anymore.

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Go to Packagen.com slash Legal AF for 15% off and a special gift. Again, that's Packagen.com slash Legal AF. One more time, Packagen.com slash Legal AF. 15% off and a free gift auto-applied at checkout. Now we've got the 52-page order of Jenner & Block. Now, Jenner & Block, waiting for this order and already having the temporary restraining order, jumped into Harvard.

They didn't have to run into the burning building, but Harvard needed protecting. Harvard, the number one or the oldest university in America, one of the most prestigious. I think they'd end up in anybody's top five, if not higher. And they have international students study at Harvard.

Donald Trump didn't like how they acted during a very small group of graduate students and other third parties that came onto campus and had First Amendment expression in protests against Israel and concerning the war with Hamas. I didn't like some of the things that were said on campus, but I'll defend to my last dying breath their ability to say it under the First Amendment, as long as they're not like

card-carrying members of a terrorist organization. And so bedsheets spray-painted with slogans in a tent city really don't bother me in America. But it did Donald Trump, and he decided to go after all international students and all of Harvard and try to take away billions of dollars of their aid and cut the pipeline between themselves and foreign students, which make up 25% of their student body, 50% of their school of diplomacy, 25% of their school of business school,

and the rest. And so Jenner and Block didn't have to go into that fight, didn't have to join with Quinn Emanuel, didn't have to join with Robert Herr, the former, you know, US attorney that worked for Donald Trump, and who's a Harvard graduate, but they did. See, it's backfiring on Donald Trump. Sure, there's more than a dozen law firms that bent the knee and pre-negotiated

and tried to avoid Donald Trump going after them. And how's that going for him? There's plenty of reports that associates who do the heavy lifting on pro bono cases do not want to go near and will not be forced to work on pro bono cases for radical right-wing organizations and MAGA because Donald Trump obtained a billion dollars worth of free legal services from some of these law firms. Kudos to Jenner and Block for fighting back. In fact, Judge Bates mentions it in his order.

He says they've done amazing work and other law firms have not. And so he has permanently enjoined the government from going after Jenner and Block and denying them the ability to apply their trade as lawyers, saying it's a violation of the First, the Fifth and the Sixth Amendment. Here's what he says in his. Let me just read you from the top of the order.

In our constitutional order, Judge Bates writes, few stars are as fixed as the principle that no official can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics. What's fair game in politics is something you can't compel by order as a government.

And in our constitutional order, few actors are essential to fixing that star as lawyers. This case arises from one of a series of executive orders targeting law firms that in one way or another did not bow to the current presidential administration's political orthodoxy

Like the others in the series, this order, which takes aim at the global firm Jenner & Block, makes no bones about why it chose its target. It picked Jenner because of the causes Jenner champions, the clients Jenner represents, and a lawyer Jenner once employed. Going after law firms in this way is doubly violative of the Constitution. Most

Obviously, retaliating against firms for their views embodied in their legal work and thereby seeking to muzzle them going forward violates the First Amendment's central command that government may not use the power of the state to punish or suppress disfavored expression.

More subtle, but perhaps more pernicious, is the message that the order sends to lawyers whose unalloyed advocacy protects against governmental viewpoint of becoming government-imposed orthodoxy. This order, like the others Judge Bates wrote, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn't like, thereby insulating the executive branch from the political check fundamental to the separation of powers they wanted to control.

castrate Jenner and Block, sideline them, and not have them oppose the Trump administration. And that didn't work because Jenner and Block has bigger brass wounds than Donald Trump. And they said, we're a law firm that's founded on ethical principles and zealous advocacy, and we're going to defend Harvard University against you. So I want to celebrate in this hot take the

the twin accomplishment of Jenner and Block in effectively the same week to obtain on one, I think they were like 48 hours apart, their own injunction blocking the Trump administration from attacking them while at the same time obtaining

against Harvard, another temporary restraining order issued by Judge Burroughs in Massachusetts, stopping Donald Trump from cutting off international student flow to Harvard University. That is a twofer that I can get behind, and hopefully you can too. You're on Legal AF, you're on the Midas Dutch Network. These are places where we join together in fellowship, shoulder to shoulder, building a pro-democracy channel. So follow us on Legal AF, the podcast, Tuesdays and, where am I? Listen,

We'll start it again. But leave it in the pod. Join us on Legal AF, the podcast, on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern time. I'll be doing it for five years. Right here on the Midas Touch Network at 8 p.m. Eastern time. And then on wherever you pick up your audio podcast platform.

If you do both, you'll help us rocket from number 13 to hopefully number two, right behind the Midas Dutch Brothers podcast. And then come over to Legal AF, the YouTube channel where we're growing our pro-democracy channel and moving towards 700,000 subscribers in less than eight months. That's all because of you. So until my next reporting, I'm Michael Popak.

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