Walter Olson
Walter Olson
President Donald Trump’s series of executive orders proclaiming various lawyers and law firms guilty of supposed offenses and subjecting them to severe unilateral penalties—“orders of attainder,” as Prof. Paul Horwitz evocatively calls them—have largely focused on lawyers who’ve engaged in campaign, electoral, or prosecutorial work against Trump personally. Now two new penalty orders broaden the range of targets to those who have publicly undercut Trump’s regular theme that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
His order against one of these targets, his first-term cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs, also escalates the stakes in a scary way. It orders the Justice Department to investigate Krebs, who vocally and forthrightly defended the integrity of the 2020 election at the time, even though Krebs has not been plausibly linked to any legal offense. (A second order commands that Miles Taylor, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, be investigated.)
Trump’s April 9 revenge order against law firm Susman Godfrey has been widely associated in press accounts with Susman’s role in pressing a series of defamation lawsuits on behalf of client Dominion Voting Systems against right-wing media outlets such as Fox and NewsMax, along with Trump allies, for spreading luridly false claims about Dominion’s supposed involvement in 2020 election fraud. While Trump has thrown around language in earlier penalty orders about law firms’ responsibility for unfounded or vexatious claims, what seems to bother him about Susman’s Dominion work is its success in winning favorable rulings before judges and hefty settlements suggestive of defendants’ very real fear of large adverse verdicts.
In racking up its victories, Susman Godfrey has done much to reinforce public awareness about how the scattershot election fraud theories of Trump and allies about 2020 have fallen flat on their face in actual courtrooms. Chris Krebs undermined the fraud narrative in a different but also powerful way. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-revenge-penalties-trump-targets-foes-stolen-election-claims