Doug Emhoff, husband of former Vice President and failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, has found himself in an embarrassing position after his law firm bent the knee to Trump. Emhoff’s situation compares to his wife’s, who was forced to certify Trump’s victory and her own defeat.
Shortly after Biden exited the White House, the former second gentleman was offered a partnership at Willkie, Farr & Gallagher law firm, unaware of the direction the company would take.
However, the Trump administration recently targeted law firms that worked with the Biden administration in persecuting him by signing the “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court” executive order. The EO aims to hold lawyers and law firms that “engage in actions that violate the laws of the United States or rules governing attorney conduct” accountable.
“For instance, in 2016, Marc Elias, founder and chair of Elias Law Group LLP, was deeply involved in the creation of a false ‘dossier’ by a foreign national” “to provide a fraudulent basis for Federal law enforcement to investigate a Presidential candidate” to “alter the outcome of the Presidential election,” the EO stated.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP also worked pro bono with the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to prosecute January 6 protesters, and Trump responded by suspending its members’ active security clearances and blacklisting it from doing business with the federal government.
Willkie, Farr & Gallagher LLP was also among the law firms that targeted Trump and his allies. Willkie Farr and O’Melveny & Myers LLP worked pro bono alongside liberal nonprofits such as Protect Democracy and Checks and Balances and the Niskanen Center think tank to challenge the construction of the Trump Wall. The law firm also worked to restore the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and won a $148 million defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani on behalf of two Georgia poll workers. It also hired an investigator to probe Trump’s alleged involvement in the January 6 protests.
However, the law firm recently reached a deal to forget the past and work with Trump by ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring policies, offering pro bono services to the president worth at least $100 million, and representing clients who have historically been underrepresented by woke law firms.
Willkie Farr was among three high-profile law firms that reached such an agreement, while over 500 others have challenged various Trump’s executive orders on law firms, terming them “a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself.”
However, Emhoff wanted to stop the law firm from working with the Trump administration, possibly to save himself the embarrassment, but was overruled.
“Speaking at a charity gala dinner Thursday night in Los Angeles, former second gentleman Doug Emhoff condemned the decision by his law firm to preemptively come to an arrangement with the Trump administration to avoid an executive order targeting the firm, sources tell CNN.”
“Emhoff told the crowd at the Annual Dinner Gala for the legal aid group Bet Tzedek he had told the firm he wanted to fight the threat of an executive order he found unconstitutional but had been overruled, the sources said.”
Willkie Farr’s co-managing partner, Thomas M. Cerabino, said the agreement was “consistent with our Firm’s views on access to Legal representation by clients, including pro bono clients, our commitment to complying with the Law as it relates to our employment practices, and our history of working with clients across a wide spectrum of political viewpoints.” Since the agreement, Cerabino said the law firm “hit records on all of our primary metrics.”
While Willkie Farr’s decision to work with the Trump administration was likely financially motivated, others’ refusal only exposes their hypocrisy and political bias, proving that, yet again, Trump was right.
