Lawyer Issues Grim Warning After Another Law Firm Caves to Trump

A Big Law associate has issued a scathing resignation letter after a different firm—Paul, Weiss—chose to bend to Donald Trump’s blatant bullying. 

Rachel Cohen, an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, circulated her strongly worded “conditional notice” of resignation to her colleagues Thursday evening.

“Please consider this email my two week notice revocable if the firm comes up with a satisfactory response to our current moment,” Cohen wrote in the email, which had the subject line “With gratitude and urgency.” 

Cohen’s resignation came just hours after the Trump administration rescinded an executive order revoking the security clearances of lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, in response to the firm pledging it would provide $40 million in free legal services on cases “that represent the full spectrum of political viewpoints of our society.”

Trump’s executive order had targeted Paul, Weiss over the work of one former employee, Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who previously oversaw the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s investigation into Trump’s alleged financial crimes. As part of bowing to Trump’s threat, the firm acknowledged that Pomerantz had committed wrongdoing. 

The firm also agreed to stop making decisions about hiring and promotions based on considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Cohen’s email included a list of conditions her firm should execute “at a minimum” to respond to Paul, Weiss’s decision to fold under pressure from the administration. 

Cohen urged her firm to sign an amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump accused Perkins Coie of “dishonest and dangerous activity” in an executive order last week, suspending the firm’s security clearances and barring federal employees from engaging with firm members. A judge temporarily blocked parts of Trump’s order, saying that it likely violated the firm’s First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights. 

Cohen called on Skadden Arps to commit to “broad future representation” and publicly commit to continue the firm’s affinity groups and other diversity initiatives.  

She also wrote that the firm should refuse requests for information on employees “clearly targeted at intimidating nonwhite employees,” and publicly refuse to fire employees at the behest of the Trump administration.

“This is not what I saw for my career or for my evening, but Paul Weiss’ decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEI, representation and staffing has forced my hand. We do not have time. It is now or it is never, and if it is never, I will not continue to work here,” Cohen wrote. 

Last week, Cohen organized an open letter criticizing the Trump administration for trying to “bully corporate law firms out of engaging in any representation that challenges the administration’s aims,” garnering more than 300 anonymous signatures from Big Law associates. 

Cohen told Politico that she hoped to see a “critical mass” of major firms publish statements expressing their willingness to represent “all sides of the coin,” even if one side went against Trump. 

“It is imperative for rule of law in this country that lawyers not be associated with the interests that they represent or not have those imputed to them,” Cohen told Politico. “Because if we don’t have that and we have a vindictive government at the federal level targeting attorneys for providing representation, then we don’t have checks and balances. We don’t have the judiciary or the court system in the way that it’s intended to function.”

In caving to Trump’s threats, Paul, Weiss established a price Big Law firms will have to pay to keep their security clearances: $40 million … and their integrity. Its decision to bow down to the administration marks other firms that take up cases challenging the administration as vulnerable to Trump’s lawless, punitive actions. It also invites the question, if major firms like Paul, Weiss won’t stand up to Trump’s punitive and targeted executive orders, who will? 

More bad news for Elon Musk and Tesla: Nearly every single Cybertruck is being recalled because the large panel near the front of the truck’s body falls off while in motion.

The recall covers 46,000 Cybertrucks on the road, or every car made from November 13, 2023, when the Cybertruck was first released, to February 27.

The panel, known as a cant rail assembly, is attached to the truck with an adhesive that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration describes as susceptible to “environmental embrittlement.”

“If the cant rail stainless steel panel separates from the vehicle while in drive, it could create a road hazard for following motorists and increase their risk of injury or a collision,” Tesla wrote, while also claiming it is “not aware of any collisions, fatalities or injuries that are or may be related to the condition.” Musk’s company says the defect only impacts 1 percent of Cybertrucks.

This comes as Tesla stocks are collapsing, losing half their value in the wake of Musk’s DOGE purges and his Seig heil-ing. There was also an attack in Las Vegas earlier this week that resulted in multiple empty Teslas blowing up. “It’s just fully terrorism at this point,” Musk wrote on X. “This level of violence is insane and deeply wrong. Tesla just makes electric cars and has done nothing to deserve these evil attacks,” he continued, infantilizing his massive company.

This is the eighth Cybertruck recall since the car’s release.

Donald Trump announced a new investment in military aircraft production Friday, revealing that he had contracted Boeing to develop “the world’s first sixth-generation” fighter jet, named the F-47. And he managed to threaten America’s allies in the process.

“It’s something the likes of which nobody has seen before, in terms of all of the attributes of a fighter jet, there’s never been anything even close to it, in terms of speed to maneuverability to payload,” Trump said during the Oval Office press briefing.

The pseudo-advertisement for the forthcoming fleet followed a tumultuous week for America’s military industrial complex, in which U.S. arms-makers were shut out of the European Union’s $800 billion defense spending plan. It also came after Canada and Portugal revealed they were similarly wobbling on whether to replace their aging air forces with American-made products.

By all means, the reveal of the F-47 needed to go well for America’s stressed defense industry—but Trump couldn’t stop himself from throwing water on the pitch.

“Our allies are calling constantly, they want to buy them all,” Trump continued, before claiming that America’s allies would get “toned-down versions.”

“We like to tone them down about 10 percent, which probably makes sense because someday maybe they’re not our allies, right?” the president said.

Foreign sales are crucial to the American arms industry, but Trump’s repeated aggression against America’s strongest alliances has made world leaders waver on whether the continued investment is worth it.

The sales pitch from American arms manufacturers simply isn’t as persuasive as it was under previous administrations. For decades, purchasing American fighter jets and weapons came with an added bonus of U.S. protection. But as global leaders have witnessed Trump defy long-standing military treatises and aggress U.S. allies, that promise no longer feels like a guarantee.

Trump’s shocking hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during critical peace negotiations, his nonsensical trade war, his threats to annex Greenland, his whiplash decisions to suspend and un-suspend military resources and intelligence with Kyiv, his venom toward NATO, and his insistence on making Canada the nation’s fifty-first state have all called the reliability of American protection into question.

The FBI’s New York field office normally handles counterintelligence, counterterrorism, public corruption, international drug trafficking, and financial crime investigations. Right now, though, it has been ordered to prioritize redacting sensitive information in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Vanity Fair reports, citing multiple sources, that nearly a thousand agents, who normally work on national security issues in the bureau’s largest field office, are working night and day combing the documents instead of on their regular jobs.

“It’s literally all hands on deck,” one unnamed source told the magazine. “I even saw an agent walking in with a pillow.” One former agent called the situation “ludicrous.”

Trump said on the campaign trail last year that he’d consider releasing Epstein’s client list, which purportedly includes the names of rich and powerful people who participated in the disgraced financier’s sexual crimes. The administration’s release of “phase one” of the files on February 27, containing previously published information, enraged Trump’s supporters who were expecting the juicy stuff incriminating Democrats and liberals. Trump himself, however, showed up seven times in the released material.

Later, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel complaining that she was told that the Justice Department had received all of the Epstein documents, only to find that the FBI’s New York office still had thousands of unreleased pages. Presumably, that’s what the agents in that office are currently working their way through and painstakingly redacting.

Bondi claimed earlier this month on Fox News that she was rushing to get a “truckload” of Epstein documents released to the public, which one longtime FBI agent told Vanity Fair didn’t make sense.

“There’s no master file in the New York office. That doesn’t exist,” the former agent said. ”There’s not some crusty agent with his feet on bankers’ boxes.”

What sensitive information could the FBI be redacting from the Epstein files? Bondi claims that any new redactions would only be to “protect grand jury information and confidential witnesses” as well as national security information. But Trump’s mention might be slowing things down, particularly if his relationship with Epstein was deeper than he has claimed. The Justice Department and FBI are now run by his loyalists, who very likely could be putting his interests ahead of the public’s.

Even the deep-red Wyoming constituents who booted out Liz Cheney are upset with the wanton way in which DOGE has gone about “eliminating fraud.”

“I’m a retired military officer.… At 18, I rose my hand to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic,” a woman said at Representative Harriet Hagemen’s town hall on Thursday. “I am still a Republican. I am—bless his heart—a Simpson Republican that believes in working together across the aisle,” she continued, referring to the recently deceased longtime Senate whip Alan Simpson from Wyoming.

“My question: Having looked at … DOGE … you are a lawyer, where is this fraud? What company, what organization, what personnel are we going after?”

“I’ll just start reading some of it, I’ll just start reading it right now if you’d like me to,” Hageman responded. “I’ll just focus on USAID spending right here.”

“I didn’t say spending, I said actual fraud!”

“This is what it is, this is the spending associated with the fraud. This is the fraud, spending is the fraud.… This is fraudulent spending,” Hageman retorted as the crowd yelled at her in disagreement.

The “fraud” that Hageman is referring to is money that was legally allocated by Congress for a variety of different programs like international aid and research grants. This is the language the Trump administration has adopted to make their federal purge seem like a positive thing. “Fraud” has been attributed to everything from contraceptives to Habitat for Humanity.