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unidentified
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composed of African-American divers. | |
| But when I saw this picture in the museum of these women and it turned out that they were a part of this group called Diving with a Purpose and that they spent their time searching for and documenting slave shipwrecks around the world, I was like, oh my God, there are people who look like me who are living a life of adventure. | ||
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unidentified
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Maybe this could be for me too. | |
| Dara Roberts with her book Written in the Waters today at 7 p.m. Eastern on Q ⁇ A on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| You can listen to Q ⁇ A wherever you get your podcasts or on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Joining us here in the studio right now is Angkush Khadori. | ||
| He's a political with political magazine, a senior writer, recently putting out a piece, the headline, I worked at a big law firm. | ||
| Here's what to know about the surrender to Trump. | ||
| Angkush Khadori, thanks for joining us. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Let's start with the law firm experience. | ||
| Talk about that. | ||
| What's your experience there? | ||
| Oh, so I actually worked at Paul Weiss, which was the first of these law firms to enter into one of these agreements with the Trump White House for about eight or nine years, depending on how I do the math. | ||
| But that was quite some time ago, almost a decade ago. | ||
| So I happen to have quite a bit of familiarity with how the firms work. | ||
| I know some of the people involved, including the head of the firm who negotiated that deal. | ||
| So, you know, I have a pretty good handle on the nature of the work and the nature of the business. | ||
| But, you know, it's been a while, but I feel like I'm sort of clear-eyed about it. | ||
| What prompted you to write this piece in particular? | ||
| Well, you know, a lot of people I think were curious and interested and frustrated and angry about the settlements, if you want to call them that, between the law firms and the Trump White House. | ||
| And we had just a lot of questions from our readers and even internally about kind of like what to make of this. | ||
| How do we put it sort of in a broader context? | ||
| There are a lot of claims and concerns about the rule of law and democracy and whether these firms are impeding, you know, those sorts of civil society type efforts and what the impact would be. | ||
| So we wanted to just sort of get into that and sort of get into the nitty-gritty if we could. | ||
| Before we go too far, let's set it up though. | ||
| Specifically, why is the president targeting these certain law firms and why are they responding as they are, some of them at least? | ||
| So it's a very good question, actually, how he's picking these firms, which I think is not entirely clear. | ||
| Initially, he seemed to be picking law firms where there had been, where they either had currently a partner or once had a partner who had been involved in one of the investigations or prosecutions of Trump. | ||
| So for instance, Wilmer Hale had Robert Mueller. | ||
| Paul Weiss had Mark Pomerant, who worked on the Manhattan DA's investigation. | ||
| Jenner and Block, Andrew Weissman, who worked on the Mueller investigation. | ||
| Since then, and particularly over the last week, there have been a series of additional settlements with like Kirkland and Ellis and ANO Sherman, I believe, where it's not exactly, it's not quite as pointed as that. | ||
| But it does seem to be the case that the Trump White House has a very broad anger, I guess, for lack of a better word, with this particular elite segment of the legal profession. | ||
| So exactly what is he doing? | ||
| If I understand it correctly, this is by executive order. | ||
| What is he trying to achieve specifically by these orders? | ||
| So his executive orders, the ones he issued, did several things. | ||
| One, they revoked the security clearances of any of the firms, excuse me, of any lawyers working at the firm. | ||
| They also prevented those lawyers, supposedly prevented, intended to prevent those firms from entering any federal property, which would include not just courthouses, but also the DOJ or the SEC, where sometimes defense lawyers have to meet with the government. | ||
| So that would be a serious impediment on a litigation practice in particular. | ||
| And then third, the executive orders suggested that the government might actually go after some of the contracts of clients that these firms have, contracts between their clients and the government. | ||
| So that was the threat. | ||
| It was implemented in several executive orders that went through. | ||
| And since then, there have been a series of law firms settling to get out ahead of an executive order like that that might target them. | ||
| Because if you cut off these avenues where you enter buildings or you have security clearances, ultimately that affects the bottom line. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The security clearance part, I think, is a relatively minor part of it because these firms don't do that much work that requires security clearances, a really small part of the work that they do. | ||
| But the prohibition on entering federal property, if that were really to be enforced, would severely impede any large law firm's litigation practice. | ||
| And is that the reason why they're responding as they are as far as getting out ahead of it? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| And I also think a lot of them just don't want to have a sort of a protracted kind of public back and forth with the White House. | ||
| I mean, several firms are now litigating this and winning so far. | ||
| But I think, unfortunately, Paul Weiss sort of set a template here, which was that, you know, you could either have these orders hanging over your head and challenge them in court, or you could go in quick and cut a deal. | ||
| And that is what Brad Karp, who is the head of Paul Weiss, did. | ||
| And then we've seen since then deals that have just been modeled off of that. | ||
| It's actually quite familiar, quite a familiar model if you're familiar with like white-collar defense work, which is, I think, frankly, how Carp came up with the idea. | ||
| Because anytime the government has like, and we see this in prosecutorial settings, the Justice Department will do like an industry-wide investigation, for instance, over price fixing and like interest rate benchmarks. | ||
| And they'll have a bunch of banks sort of on the chopping block, for lack of a better word, or in their crosshairs. | ||
| And you start to settle with one. | ||
| The first person in gets the best deal, which Brad knows. | ||
| And then everybody else kind of attempts to set a precedent. | ||
| And the numbers get worse for everyone who settles afterward, which is what we're seeing. | ||
| Do you know him personally from your experience at the firm? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you're talking with him, did he say anything to you about why they're taking this approach? | ||
| I haven't spoken to him since this. | ||
| I mean, I know him well enough to know that this is not surprising to me at all. | ||
| These firms are businesses, first and foremost. | ||
| They're for-profit businesses. | ||
| They work for extremely wealthy interests. | ||
| And I'm talking about the largest companies and the wealthiest people in the country. | ||
| And that's how their business works. | ||
| I mean, that's what I did when I worked for them. | ||
| It's not nefarious or corrupt. | ||
| It's just the nature of the business. | ||
| They're not sort of vanguards of principle or bravery, to be honest. | ||
| I mean, I would think about them more as like large banks, right? | ||
| And so like if this had happened with like JP Morgan or Citibank, we would not be sitting around saying, oh, how I can't believe Citibank betrayed us because our expectations for Citibank are very low. | ||
| And our expectations for these firms should also be very low, which is not to say that they should not be criticized. | ||
| They should. | ||
| But that is sort of how I try to put into some context for people. | ||
| Our guest is going to be with us, and you can ask him questions about this situation with the president and certain law firms, the responses of these law firms and his experiences while writing this piece. | ||
| You can find it online. | ||
| 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can text us those questions or comments if you want at 202-748-8003. | ||
| The president last week, when he was appearing with some coal workers, brought up this idea of the situation with the law firms. | ||
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unidentified
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I want to play a little bit of what he had to say, get your response to it. | |
| In addition, I'm instructing the Department of Justice to identify and fight every single unconstitutional state or local regulation that's putting our coal miners out of business. | ||
| And we are withdrawing all of those objections from our government today. | ||
| It's all being withdrawn. | ||
| So all of you people that have been fighting for your lives, we are withdrawing all of that today. | ||
| We have excellent lawyers. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump? | ||
| $100 million, another $100 million for damages that they've done. | ||
| But they give you $100 million and then they announce that, but we have done nothing wrong. | ||
| And I agree, they've done nothing wrong. | ||
| But what the hell? | ||
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unidentified
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They give me a lot of money considering they've done nothing wrong. | |
| And we'll use some of those people, some of those great firms. | ||
| They are great firms too. | ||
| They just had a bad moment. | ||
| But we're going to use some of those firms to work with you on your leasing and your other things. | ||
| And they'll do a great job. | ||
| I think they're going to do a fantastic job. | ||
| Mr. Kedori, to that last part, we'll use some of your firms. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| Yeah, so as part of these deals, all of the firms who've settled agreed to commit tens of millions of dollars in value of pro bono work toward the administration's initiatives. | ||
| So Paul Weiss started off by committing $40 million worth of pro bono work toward administration initiatives concerning veterans and other things like that. | ||
| These commitments are very vague, which is why he's now able to exploit them. | ||
| And then after Paul Weiss, the numbers became close to like $100 million, I think, and up for some of the other firms in terms of value. | ||
| So now what he is suggesting, which is fascinating, well, he's doing two things. | ||
| One is he's rubbing it in, right? | ||
| And this is what he does. | ||
| When he undermines someone, he likes to keep his foot on their neck, and that is what he's doing. | ||
| The second thing he's doing is that, I mean, he's really exposing the remarkable nature of the agreements that he entered into with them because it is unclear what kind of commitment they undertook with him. | ||
| And he seems to be serious about it. | ||
| This is not the only comment like this he made last week. | ||
| So it may be the case that Trump ends up going to them, insisting that they do some of this work, and that would be a remarkable turn of events. | ||
| You wrote that some of the firms have decided to make these deals. | ||
| Some of the firms have legally fought them, some of them winning. | ||
| What's the legal basis for fighting? | ||
| Well, what's the legal basis of the administration doing this in the first place, I suspect? | ||
| There is no real legal basis. | ||
| I mean, this is wholly unprecedented. | ||
| I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime. | ||
| The allegations against them do not warrant any type of prohibitions like this. | ||
| These are entirely novel, so far as I can tell. | ||
| And the defense is a very basic one, which is a First Amendment defense, which is that these firms have the right to associate as corporations and pursue the work that they want to do. | ||
| And also, to some extent, a Sixth Amendment argument, which is that companies as well, have a right to counsel, and this is impeding these companies' ability to get their lawyers because who would want to hire a lawyer who you think is on the wrong side of the administration that you're adverse to, right? | ||
| So those are the sort of principal arguments. | ||
| Have we seen, I guess, a reduction of the amount of firms that the president is targeting, or is this a consistent thing that he's doing? | ||
| It's consistent. | ||
| I mean, I actually thought a couple weeks ago they were almost done. | ||
| But late last week, they announced a handful of new ones. | ||
| And so I have the same question I had two weeks ago, which is, are they done now, or are we going to see more? | ||
| It's unclear. | ||
| Let's hear from Sam. | ||
| Sam joins us from Maryland on our line for independence. | ||
| Ankash Kadori is our guest from Political Magazine writing about this experience with the legal firms and their and President Trump. | ||
| Sam, good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| You know, looking at this from both a lay person's perspective and from the light most favorable to even government, this is totally unprecedented and does not make sense that the public is not outraged that a president is targeting law firms that for the, at the very least, | ||
| you know, their job is to defend clients in the courts of law and the courts of law actually make decisions based on whatever it is that being defended upon. | ||
| So how would the public just sit by and have a president just come down with a hammer and begin to do something like this? | ||
| Sam and Marilyn, thanks. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, you know, I think it's a very sound observation. | |
| I mean, this is an abuse of authority. | ||
| I don't think it's really hard to avoid that conclusion. | ||
| And, you know, the public's response has somewhat surprised me because I have to say, in general, the public does not really like lawyers. | ||
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unidentified
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It's painful for me to admit, but it's true. | |
| And people seem to have been quite disappointed by this. | ||
| And, you know, one of the interesting things that Trump does in his life is he kind of exposes people for the hollowness of their principles. | ||
| And he's managed to do this with these folks, too. | ||
| I'm not surprised, but a lot of people are. | ||
| And what I would say is, you know, I think everyone involved here deserves to be criticized. | ||
| Not just Trump, but all of the firms that have settled with him. | ||
| It is really embarrassing. | ||
| People are rightly criticizing them. | ||
| I doubt, I mean, I don't know if there will be any significant business impact for them. | ||
| But the way I see it, if you give me a second to elaborate here, is, you know, if we saw this happening in any other country, right, could you just imagine if we had our foreign correspondents reporting on this happening in another country, we would report it as state-sanctioned extortion and bribery, right? | ||
| We have the wealthiest lawyers in the country going to the White House, offering up these concessions affirmatively. | ||
| Under federal law, we would ordinarily call that extortion. | ||
| And we would ordinarily call the person who came up with that idea, Brad Carpet Paul Weiss, somebody who may have been engaged in conspiracy to commit extortion and aiding and abetting extortion. | ||
| These are very serious legal issues that have been sort of subsumed given the public discourse and the fact that they're dealing with Trump, the most senior government official possible, which means they will not get prosecuted or investigated over this. | ||
| And so everybody is sort of looking at this, and I think it's a mess and people are frustrated. | ||
| Let's hear from Dory. | ||
| Dory's in Tampa for our guest, Democrats line. | ||
| Hi, you're up next. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, good morning. | |
| I just want to thank Mr. Kadori for this piece. | ||
| My family is from Central and South America, and he's exactly right. | ||
| It's incredible how here we seem to be lying down taking this, but in South and Central America, that would never be the case. | ||
| I just came back from visiting Guatemala, and I will tell you that even the media representation of everything Trump is doing there is so biased. | ||
| You would think Fox News owns Central and South America. |