In a blistering ruling, a federal judge blocked a new executive order from President Donald Trump punishing a prominent law firm that successfully sued Fox News for promoting false claims of election fraud.
U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan, speaking from the bench in her Washington, D.C., courtroom Tuesday, said Trump’s order targeting the law firm Susman Godfrey was part of a “personal vendetta.”
“The framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power,” AliKhan said.
The legal battle over Susman Godfrey is part of an intensifying effort by Trump to target his critics and other perceived enemies with presidential memorandums and executive orders that leverage the power of the Justice Department and other federal agencies to punish his opponents, legal experts and former Justice Department officials said.
Among the broad array of those targeted by Trump in recent weeks: multiple large law firms that challenged him or his administration in court, former aides who defied him during and after his first term, and people who vandalize Tesla dealerships. Trump also directed the Justice Department to drop all pending investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s actions are a sweeping departure from a voluntary norm upheld by Republican and Democratic presidents since the Watergate scandal. It emerged after President Richard Nixon was found to have improperly used Justice Department investigations, lawsuits and subpoenas to punish or discredit his rivals.
President Gerald Ford and his successors agreed that the president would decide the broad law enforcement and legal priorities of the Justice Department. But the attorney general and DOJ prosecutors would determine which individuals and organizations to investigate based on the facts and the laws involved.
That norm was never enshrined in law, and legal experts and former Justice Department officials say Trump has moved swiftly to undermine it in his first three months back in office.
“If these measures don’t destroy the independence of DOJ, they certainly undermine it severely,” said Ilya Somin, a libertarian legal scholar at George Mason University and the Cato Institute. “Worse, by targeting the president’s political opponents for investigation... they threaten freedom of speech and perhaps other civil liberties.”
Somin and other legal experts said they believe Trump's executive orders regarding law firms are unprecedented and also designed to silence critics of the president.
White House spokesman Harrison Fields disputed that Trump is dictating investigations to the Justice Department.
“The DOJ is acting completely independently of the president,” he said. “They are running their own show.”
Fields said Trump had not intervened in a criminal case. “There’s no actual example of the president somehow becoming involved in a criminal case,” he said.
Fields did not dispute that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her team are carrying out the president’s broad policy priorities. “The attorney general works for the president,” he said. “It’s not unheard of for them to be singing off the same songbook.”
A spokesperson for Bondi declined to comment. Republican supporters of Bondi and Trump have praised their performance in office and said they are both acting properly.
Targeting law firms and former aides
Susman Godfrey, the Houston-based firm that represents voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems, secured a $787 million settlement from Fox News in 2023.
Dominion had filed a lawsuit accusing the network of allowing baseless conspiracies to proliferate on air about the company’s voting machines “rigging” the 2020 presidential election against Trump.
AliKhan’s ruling temporarily halts Trump’s order, which called for the canceling of federal contracts held by Susman Godfrey and its clients. It also barred its employees from entering federal buildings and revoked their government security clearances.
The decision came after a lawyer representing Susman Godfrey, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., argued that the only thing that would stop Trump from undermining the rule of law was for judges to act.
“We’re sliding very fast into an abyss here,” said Verrilli, who was solicitor general in the Obama administration.
On the same day last week that Trump issued the executive order against Susman Godfrey, he signed a presidential memorandum directing Bondi to review the conduct of Chris Krebs when he was a top cybersecurity official in Trump’s first term. Following the 2020 election, Trump fired Krebs after he contradicted Trump’s false claim that the race was stolen from him.
Trump also signed a presidential memorandum that directed the homeland security secretary to review the activities of Miles Taylor as a government employee. Taylor wrote an anonymous memoir that criticized Trump’s handling of classified documents and other conduct during his first term.
The following day, Bondi stated in a televised Cabinet meeting that Trump had directed her to prioritize attacks on Tesla dealerships owned by Elon Musk, the head of DOGE and one of Trump’s largest campaign donors.
“There will be no negotiations at your directive," Bondi said. "They’re all looking at 20 years in prison.”
"That's great," Trump replied.
Trump’s effort to punish Susman Godfrey followed previous executive orders targeting multiple other law firms. Trump also issued a presidential memorandum last month that authorized the attorney general and the homeland security secretary to sanction law firms that file lawsuits they deem “frivolous.”
It directed Bondi to recommend penalties, including terminating law firms’ federal contracts and the federal contracts of their clients, as well as revoking attorneys' ability to have security clearances or enter federal buildings. Steve Bannon, a close ally of Trump, said the goal was to force the firms out of business.
Fearing the loss of large numbers of clients, multiple law firms have reached settlements with Trump that require them to provide tens of millions of dollars in free legal representation to causes that Trump backs. Susman Godfrey and several other firms have gone to court and asked judges to declare Trump's actions illegal.
Legal scholars have said that Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms are designed to intimidate firms into declining to represent people and causes with which he disagrees.
Weaponization accusations
Trump and his allies contend that then-President Joe Biden weaponized the Justice Department against him. They have repeatedly accused the Biden White House of pressing Justice Department prosecutors to be tough on Trump and of holding them back in the cases of Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Fields, the spokesman for the Trump White House, dismissed the idea that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department was independent from the Biden White House, calling the claim “smoke and mirrors.”
Despite investigations by Republican-led committees in Congress, no specific evidence has emerged that Garland improperly influenced special counsel investigations of Trump or hampered investigations of Biden or Hunter Biden.
Former aides to Garland have said he took great pains to distance himself from the White House and Biden, especially after Garland appointed special counsels to investigate Trump, Biden and Hunter Biden. Garland, they added, also intentionally minimized his public and private interactions with Biden.
Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University Law School, said that Trump, not Biden, has violated norms. Gillers noted that the executive orders and memorandums issued by Trump leave every step of the process — defining an individual's or organization's possible offense, deciding whether they are guilty and inflicting a punishment — controlled by Trump and his aides.
Gillers added: “Trump is acting as prosecutor, legislature and judge.”
