On today's show, Alex Blumberg and David Rhodes discuss the latest fallout from President Trump's executive order targeting a law firm that has been critical of the White House. They also discuss the impact on the economy and the stock market.
00:00:00.000Saturday, the president issued a memorandum called preventing abuses of the legal system
00:00:04.620and the federal court. And this was President Trump saying that his administration, the attorney
00:00:10.240general and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security could decide on their own if
00:00:16.780legal cases filed by certain lawyers or law firms were frivolous. And then what's extraordinary here
00:00:22.320was that they could then enact sanctions against the law firm. And one of the key things that came
00:00:26.580out over the weekend was there was this criticism of a law firm that sort of settled with Trump,
00:00:30.940Paul Weiss. They were one of these law firms that were targeted. And it wasn't just that,
00:00:35.340you know, the Trump administration is talking about taking away Paul Weiss's federal contracts.
00:00:40.120They said that any company that continued to work with Paul Weiss would have its federal contracts
00:00:46.660taken away. And the head of that law firm said that he settled with the White House because
00:00:51.440they were going to be forced out of business. Steve Bannon said last week, the goal is to
00:00:56.480bankrupt law firms that challenged this administration. No president has done this.
00:01:02.600Ronald Reagan didn't do this. George H.W. Bush, George Bush didn't do this. And so it's just
00:01:08.420unprecedented and alarming to a lot of lawyers and legal experts.
00:01:12.640So the head of Paul Weiss, and this is the firm that Trump had leveled an executive order against
00:01:19.540that essentially had crippled the firm's ability to do business, sent a long message to his staff
00:01:26.400to his fellow attorneys at his firm on Sunday. And it was the second time since Thursday that he had
00:01:33.680sent out one of these. And in that message, he tried to explain why was it that he had gone into
00:01:40.460the Oval Office and made this deal with Donald Trump to end this executive order. He had taken a lot
00:01:47.440of heat about it in the press and in the legal world for doing this. And that was especially acute
00:01:54.640because he himself had been such a prominent Democrat. He was someone who raised money for
00:02:02.080Joe Biden. His firm had helped prepare Kamala Harris for the vice presidential debate. And he himself
00:02:10.120had tried to harness the powers of the legal community against Donald Trump when he was president
00:02:14.520during his first term. And in his message was a pretty revealing claim. And that was that even
00:02:22.920though judges in, you know, in the federal level, or at least one judge has said that this executive
00:02:30.540order is no good, it was too risky for the firm to actually go to court to fight that because they
00:02:37.600would have lost their clients, that the firm's clients would have thought that the firm was
00:02:44.280persona non grata with the government, was out of favor with the administration, and it would take
00:02:50.520its legal work elsewhere. And to me, it showed a remarkable power that Trump has developed in his
00:02:57.800executive orders, that he was able to get a firm that easily could have gone to court to fight something
00:03:03.500to instead go to the Oval Office and make a deal with him, a deal in which they committed to giving
00:03:08.920$40 million in pro bono legal services to causes that Trump himself has championed.
00:03:15.900Front pages of the papers today, you've got the New York Times. The Times has a picture of the Pope
00:03:20.980on the front page, also talking about how disturbing it is that law firms that may not agree with the
00:03:27.440president being targeted. David Rhodes here to talk about that. Also, Wall Street Journal editorial page
00:03:33.360at the top, gelling of Erdogan rival Spurs protests in Turkey, and it really does. And also, very
00:03:40.200interesting, a headline right here that's really, we also are seeing in the Financial Times this morning
00:03:47.140too, that people are starting to park their money outside of U.S. stocks, or go long-time fans of U.S.
00:03:55.160stocks are parking their money elsewhere. This is on the front page of the Financial Times,
00:03:59.340Trump terror of tremors shatter Wall Street's faith in American exceptionalism. It's something that we
00:04:05.200were talking about on Friday, and it really is remarkable what a couple of months difference
00:04:11.960makes. I know you, Mika, you saw when I came back from Britain, came back from Europe, and I was
00:04:17.560talking about how they were in awe of our economy in December, and just saying, my God, there's no way
00:04:23.720we can compete with you. You have all the animal spirits. We've lost all the animal spirits. It's
00:04:28.620really, it's just the opposite now. I was speaking yesterday to a man who has an American who has
00:04:34.140business in the U.S., but also in Germany, and just talking about the fact that in Germany, things have
00:04:41.980been so flat, but now they're waking up to history and understanding the United States doesn't seem to
00:04:48.640want to be there to help them out. The chilling effect is already there, even if indeed a judge
00:04:54.120does step in, a court does step in. The message has been sent by this White House. If you defy us,
00:04:59.560we're going to make your life miserable. Now, the law firm like this, clients in that law firm now may
00:05:04.980think twice. Do we really want to work with them? Maybe we'll go somewhere else now, somewhere less
00:05:09.080controversial. So there could be a real issue for that law firm. There could be a chilling effect
00:05:13.840elsewhere in the legal community. And Mika, we talked about this on Friday as well, but this is
00:05:18.960one of the top examples, just about, frankly, how much more clever the Trump administration is being
00:05:24.760this time around in terms of using the levers of government, the levers of power, creative ways to get
00:05:31.400that retribution, to get that revenge, and to defy others, to challenge them.
00:05:36.360This is the primal scream of a dying regime. Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on
00:05:47.380these people. I got a free shot, all these networks lying about the people. The people have had a
00:05:54.240belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that. I know you've tried to do everything in the
00:05:57.920world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen. And where do people like
00:06:01.520that go to share the big line? MAGA Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people
00:06:09.140had a conscience. Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer is to save my
00:06:17.080country, this country will be saved. War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:06:24.280It's Monday, 24 March in the year of our Lord 2025. If you defy us, we will make your life miserable.
00:06:38.820It's not about defying, and it's not about having, what they say had some disagreements. This was full
00:06:43.700on the legal apparatus of this country, which is completely run by left-wingers. And Paul Weiss,
00:06:52.660and this is what I love about this, we're getting, we're now getting down to it, both on the financial
00:06:59.560side and on the legal apparatus and taking on the administrative state and the deep state.
00:07:06.060President Trump has a full-on assault on the elites of this country and the elite institutions
00:07:11.800that have turned against the American people and demonized the American people,
00:07:17.520made their lives miserable, made their lives economically much harder, took away the futures
00:07:23.300of their kids. He's now turned around and he's going after that. Hammer and Tong.
00:07:30.520And they're folding. They're not powerful when you confront them.
00:07:36.400CNN has an entire article from Stephen Collinson, who is the smartest guy over there.
00:07:43.660Never seen him on camera. Don't know why that is.
00:07:48.400Haydn. But he's talking about Trump's going, and he goes through every part of the elites.
00:07:53.420It could have come from the script. In fact, I think he lifted that from, he must watch War Room
00:07:58.440because he's lifting it from War Room, but that's okay. We needed to get out to the CNN crowd.
00:08:04.320President Trump full on. The cabinet meets at 11, this alternative.
00:08:09.160Cabinet meets at 11 o'clock. We will go live there to see if President Trump does one of his open-ended
00:08:16.680press avails when the cabinet's seated. House is back at noon. Senate's back, I think, this afternoon
00:08:23.260or this evening. They've now got to deal with all the issues they've left open, which is basically
00:08:30.120everything. President Trump, two things. Also, over the weekend, and finally, the Secretary of Commerce,
00:08:37.740somebody benched him. Thank God. He needs to do more commerce. He should be focused on the
00:08:45.220reciprocity tariffs on the second. The biggest single geoeconomic pivot in the history of the
00:08:54.200United States industrial policy since the early 20th century. We don't need any more comments on him
00:09:01.840on Social Security. Elon Musk is going to be at the cabinet meeting today. I think the first question
00:09:07.280has got to be on fraud on Social Security. Very straightforward question. What he found on
00:09:11.840fraud, we need to know, even directionally, because the judge is calling out that we haven't found
00:09:18.600anything, and you're causing a ruckus, and polling on this is not great. So we have to know if the
00:09:25.660political pain is worth, if the candle's worth the game. I assume it is. But we need to start putting
00:09:32.780some facts of that. Also, in the House, there's a decision to be made. And Mike Davis, and I think
00:09:39.420people are thinking through, is that what the House is trying to do, because remember, they always want
00:09:44.100as little confrontation as possible. They're backing this Daryl Issa bill that would have set up this,
00:09:53.640you know, you can't have these judges, these rogue judges give nationwide blanket injunctions or TROs.
00:10:02.280You go to Rhode Island, you go to San Francisco, you go to these left wing places, get a judge that
00:10:07.100shuts down the whole country. Yes, that's very important. But that's in lieu of they want to
00:10:11.040pivot away from the impeachment of the of the judge, of the judge that's in charge of the national
00:10:18.940security issue. And now we got Venezuela taking planes. And people should know President Trump
00:10:23.940still sending planes full of terrorist criminals. John Solomon's got a big story up on how that judge
00:10:31.400went to Idaho, went out to some conference, a junket as a judge full of Trump haters put on by Trump
00:10:39.240haters. Never Trumpers and Trump haters. He goes as a federal judge. His conflicts of legion,
00:10:46.500Laura Loomis has done such a great job, not simply his wife, but his daughter. You got another
00:10:51.200merchant situation. Also, just for and we know he's not going to be removed in the Senate by a trial.
00:10:57.900It's not the point. Trust the process. The process itself will send a signal to this radical judiciary.
00:11:04.780You're not untouchable. In fact, you can be touched.
00:11:07.440That's why this Paul Weiss situation had these law firms that control the nation's capital.
00:11:15.720And they're so embedded now because they're quasi private equity.
00:11:19.840The private quasi private equity. Paul Weiss is revenues for a law firm.
00:11:24.220These are guys a bill by the hour, folks, supposedly two point six billion dollars.
00:11:28.180And I want to congratulate Boris Epstein in the team that is working on this.
00:11:36.460Also in the government for coming up. Boris had to put together a pickup team for two years.
00:11:42.220Why? The law firms fired Trump and fired all the people around Trump.
00:11:47.640So we can't represent you. Why? Because, oh, our clients said that we do. You're bad people.
00:11:52.640So they blame the clients. That's what I love about the executive order.
00:11:55.960You know what the executive order said? We're stripping your security clearance.
00:11:59.500We're stripping you of any government contracts.
00:12:01.900Oh, by the way, any client, any client that still continues to retain you will lose their government contracts.
00:12:11.460There's a big, big controversy over the weekend that the Democratic law firms didn't stick together.
00:12:17.320Paul Weiss had had these guys in unison before.
00:12:19.960They didn't stick together. Why? They started going after Paul Weiss's clients.
00:12:24.720That's when Paul Weiss, the firm, surrendered.
00:12:28.000I cannot emphasize enough how big this is to shatter.
00:12:33.200And the head went down as a supplicant, one of the biggest Trump haters.
00:12:37.140President Trump said, hey, why don't you come down? Let's have a meeting.
00:12:39.660Let's talk about this face to face where he signed the surrender document.
00:12:43.040And now you've got these, you've got these grundoons in the law firms, these associates sending emails out.
00:12:49.580I need over at Skadden Arps, some young woman, I need to know immediately if you're going to kowtow because this concerns my two weeks notice.
00:12:56.600Hey, baby, don't take two weeks notice. Go now, leave now.
00:12:59.280Because all those firms are going to be out of business.
00:13:04.440President Trump is on a full on assault of the elite capture of every institution in this nation.
00:13:26.220All these universities, all these institutions, your taxpayer dollars, your kids are on the carrier battle groups and in the Hindu Kush and in Romania with the 101st.
00:13:40.440On Okinawa with the Marines and Korea everywhere.
00:13:45.520Your kids, sons and daughters, protect them.
00:14:35.720Bernie and AOC cosplay running around phony populism.
00:14:41.320Hey, you can't have populism if you are part of the problem that allowed 10 million illegal alien invaders here to destroy the wages of Hispanics and African Americans.
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00:16:12.300Saturday, the president issued a memorandum called Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court.
00:16:18.200And this was President Trump saying that his administration, the attorney general and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, could decide on their own if legal cases filed by certain lawyers or law firms were frivolous.
00:16:33.640And then what's extraordinary here was that they could then enact sanctions against the law firm.
00:16:37.240And one of the key things that came out over the weekend was there was this criticism of a law firm that sort of settled with Trump, Paul Weiss.
00:16:44.020They were one of these law firms that were targeted.
00:16:46.900And it wasn't just that, you know, the Trump administration is talking about taking away Paul Weiss's federal contracts.
00:16:52.620They said that any company that continued to work with Paul Weiss would have its federal contracts taken away.
00:16:59.800And the head of that law firm said that he settled with the White House because they were going to be forced out of business.
00:17:06.380Steve Bannon said last week the goal is to bankrupt law firms that challenge this administration.
00:26:15.180Because at post-war, we had Bretton Woods and we had the IMF and we set up the World Bank and we set up NATO as a system of alliances and institutions.
00:26:27.420Yo, dude, if Biden hadn't had nine trillion, which E.J. and Tony's put it today, had nine trillion dollars of spending and deficit and driven purchasing power of the dollar down 22% in four years.
00:26:40.280It doesn't matter if you got great institutions or no institutions.
00:26:51.860The reason that the BRICS are around, the reason they're talking about a potential gold-back collection of securities ain't because the World Bank's not giving them free money, not because the IMF's not out there screwing everything up, not because the NATO's, that the European elites not having to put any money in for their defense.
00:27:08.920I could go on and on and on about your phony argument about institutions.
00:27:13.260It's because of massive federal spending, massive deficits.
00:27:21.280They have to refinance $10 trillion this year.
00:32:43.100Don't sit there and get, I said, I'd love the fact, yes, the thing of the rogue judges, and that's important, but it's not as important as putting somebody through the process.
00:32:51.080You put one through the process, they're all going to be sheep.
00:32:55.680Let's put the guy that tried to step between the commander-in-chief and his duty of the national security of the United States, of which, I don't know, the polling's 80-20 that we're winning on this one.
00:33:56.980Only we are allowed to do these sorts of things.
00:34:00.080It's a kind of Mary McCarthy sort of essay.
00:34:04.620You remember that Mary McCarthy once said about Lillian Hellman, the playwright Lillian Hellman, the communist playwright Lillian Hellman, that everything she said, including the words and and but, were lies.
00:34:38.400It's the class that has, you know, aggregated to itself all of the societal perks and power, and they feel like they are in charge.
00:34:51.420So, for example, you were mentioning Columbia earlier, you know, somebody organized a joint letter signed, actually, by some people who I know and respect.
00:35:07.160They basically said the government may not threaten funding cuts to pressure recipients into suppressing viewpoints and so on.
00:35:16.060Well, what has the government been doing ever since, you know, the Great Society, Title VI, Title IX?
00:35:24.200They said, if you don't do these things that we want you to do, that, you know, transgender bathrooms, having women in sport, men in women's sports, and on and on and on, we'll take your funding away.
00:35:38.220So that is exactly what Donald Trump is doing here.
00:35:44.080They said, you know, it's not McCarthy.
00:35:46.980You know, the New York Times had a piece of this is a McCarthy-ite tactic.
00:37:24.240And I'm glad that these guys from Venezuela who were here trying to assault Americans, I'm glad that they're in that jail.
00:37:32.360And I don't see how, where this district judge, where all these judges, where do they get the jurisdiction to say that they can impinge upon presidential power, executive power?
00:37:43.060They somehow feel that if they're sufficiently anti-Trump, that makes them susceptible to, you know, acquiring little bits of executive power.
00:38:30.080You're at the forefront of these institutional and how important it is for President Trump to leave our mark, the populist nationalist mark on our institutions, particularly Kennedy Center and other institutions of high culture.
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