Note: This column is by famed conservative lawyer Andrew McCarthy, oft-times a Trump defender, in National Review.
(March 15) Every fiber in my being makes me want to ignore the Perkins Coie story.
It stems from a March 6 executive order, in which President Trump condemned and sought to punish the law firm that prominently represented the Democratic Party, the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, and others implicated in the plot to frame Trump as a clandestine agent of Russia. Two top lawyers deeply involved in that scheme are no longer at the firm, which Trump is evidently trying to put out of business. The Seattle-based organization employs 3,700 people: 1,200 lawyers and the rest support staff, almost none of whom had anything to do with Russiagate.
The executive order — so subtly titled “Addressing the Risks from Perkins Coie LLP” — is nothing less than a bill of attainder, as that unconstitutional decree has always been understood in American law.
The Left Doesn’t Make This Easy
I’d prefer to ignore the EO because the Democrats and their base supporters now expressing outrage over it are hypocrites. I know: To put the power of the presidency behind ostracism of this kind — this professional death sentence and all the financial and reputational harm it entails — takes things to a new degree of egregiousness. But it’s not a new kind.
Democrats and their Trump-deranged allies in the legal profession did precisely this sort of thing to John Eastman and other Trump lawyers involved in the “stop the steal” soft coup attempt to retain Trump in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election….
The defamatory hardball played by Trump’s political opponents was appalling. I wrote a book about it when it was still unfolding: Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. Trump is right to believe that it should have been covered and adjudged a scandal of Watergate dimension (rather than casually set aside by the media once the allegations were shown to be a smear).
Trump is stubbornly wrong, however, in refusing to accept that the payback he gets — extraordinary payback, but the only legitimate payback — is his stunning political comeback. The Democrats suffered thunderous defeat, in large part because the public saw these and other lawfare abuses as scandalous. That has to be enough. Trump’s retribution is that he won the presidency; it is not turning the presidency into lawfare on steroids….
Donald Trump is of the eye-for-an-eye school. Revenge for a more fit man would be to revel in winning the presidency against all odds and try to be a good president for everyone — thus proving his critics wrong. Trump, by contrast, seems determined to prove his critics right by exploiting the awesome might of the presidency to destroy his enemies, just as they tried to destroy him.
He doesn’t get to do that. Not if the Constitution has anything to say about it…. [The full column is at this link.]
