The Trump administration on Wednesday issued an executive order singling out another law firm and warned that five more firms have targets on their backs in his ongoing retribution against “Big Law” firms.
During President Donald Trump’s signing of the executive order against top U.S. litigation firm Susman Godfrey, U.S. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller said the administration has attained nearly 600 million in legal wins against law firms they’ve accused of undermining the legal system.
“We’re getting close to a billion,” Miller said.
The order removes the law firm’s access to government resources and buildings, actions Trump said Wednesday were “just starting the process.”
In a statement posted on its website, Susman Godfrey said the would take action against the order:
“Anyone who knows Susman Godfrey knows we believe in the rule of law, and we take seriously our duty to uphold it. This principle guides us now. There is no question that we will fight this unconstitutional order.”
In 2023, Susman Godfrey’s client, Dominion Voting Systems, received $787.5 million in settlement funds for a defamation lawsuit against Fox News for promoting misleading information regarding the 2020 election results. Dominion sells voting machines and tabulators nationwide and was accused of rigging the 2020 presidential election.
“This firm is very involved in the election misconduct,” said White House staff secretary Will Scharf during Wednesday’s signings.
Orders against former Trump staffers
Two former staffers from Trump’s first administration were stripped of their governmental security clearances and the Department of Justice and the Secretary of Homeland Security were ordered to probe into their time as federal employees.
The two men now under investigation by the White House are former Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor and former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs.
The executive order against Taylor accuses him of prioritizing “his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.” In 2018, Taylor wrote an anonymous opinion piece titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” published by The New York Times. In it, he details that he and many past officials were actively working to divert Trump’s agenda during his first term in office.
“In his capacity with the Department of Homeland Security, he leaked classified information,” Scharf said. ”He wrote a book under the pseudonym ‘Anonymous,’ making outrageous claims, both about your administration and about others in it.”
In 2019, Taylor once again anonymously published a book titled “A Warning,” further cautioning Americans regarding his former employer and current president’s motives. Taylor became public about his authorship after leaving his position in 2020.
In Trump’s eyes, Taylor is a modern-day Benedict Arnold.
“He got a lot of publicity off that one. He’s like a promoter,” Trump said during the order signing. “I think it’s a very important case, and I think he’s guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we’ll find out.”
Krebs is accused of using his position in CISA to “unlawfully” censor speech that did not align with his politics. Though he served under a Republican president, the order claims Krebs “suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting supposed disinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission.”
Trump fired Krebs following his department’s statement that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history.”
The order stated that “Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”