Firms That Caved to Trump Are Helping Him Break the Law, Dems Warn

A group of Democratic lawmakers are demanding answers from nine major law firms that struck deals with Donald Trump’s administration to avoid being targeted by the president’s fury.

In a series of letters Thursday, 16 Democratic lawmakers warned the managing partners of several large law firms that the agreements they’d made with the Trump administration—offering millions of dollars in pro bono work on issues that support the president’s agenda, among other concessions—were unenforceable and potentially violated federal and state laws.

The 16 lawmakers that sent the letters included Representatives Dave Min of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Becca Balint of Vermont. They warned that by issuing executive orders targeting certain law firms, the Trump administration had used “coercive and illegal measures to target certain law firms and threaten their ability to represent and retain their clients.” In total, the law firms had pledged a whopping $940 million in pro bono work to the Trump administration.

The letters alleged that Trump’s scheme to blackmail firms into abolishing their DEI practices and cough up millions in free work could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering. The deals could also potentially violate the Hobbs Act, according to lawmakers, which “prohibits obstruction, delay, or affecting commerce by extortion under color of official right.”

The deals potentially violated state laws and rules of professional conduct too, the lawmakers said.

Not every firm that struck a deal, or received a letter, had been openly targeted by the Trump administration. Several had preemptively approached the government to make concessions, according to statements from the firms. The lawmakers warned that the deals would have a “chilling effect” on “the availability of legal services for those clients and matters targeted by the Trump administration.”

The nine law firms that received letters were Allen Overy Shearman Sterling LLP; Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP; Latham & Watkins LLP; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP; Milbank LLP; Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

In the letters, each firm was asked a series of questions about the details of their individual deals with the Trump administration, and how exactly they’d come about.

For example, Paul Weiss, the first law firm to bow to Trump, had agreed to acknowledge that one of its attorneys, Mark Pomerantz, had committed wrongdoing, according to the White House. Trump had targeted Pomerantz for his efforts to build a case against the president when Pomerantz served at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office—not illegal in the slightest. The lawmakers asked Paul Weiss to explain specifically what alleged “wrongdoing” Pomerantz had committed. Like many of the other firms, Paul Weiss had also offered millions in free legal services and revoked their hiring practices that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Other questions were the same for every firm. “Outside observers have also stated that these agreements represent a ‘Sword of Damocles,’ with a risk that the administration will again threaten to target firms with Executive Orders if they do not again yield to the President’s demands,” one question read, asking what the firm planned to do to “ensure that the administration will not be able to require more from the firm beyond the provisions currently in place?”

Earlier this week, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut penned letters to five major law firms that they accused of being “complicit in efforts to undermine the rule of law.”

Trump thinks that Russia not completely colonizing Ukraine is a concession on the path to peace.

“Mr. President … what concessions has Russia offered up thus far to get to the point where you’re closer to peace?” a reporter asked Trump, during a meeting with the Norwegian prime minister in the Oval Office on Thursday.

“Stopping the war. Stopping taking the whole country. Pretty big concession,” Trump replied dryly.

Promising to not invade a neighboring country is not a concession, especially not when you’ve already bombed said neighbor for over two years. Just hours before, Trump had resorted to Truth Social to beg Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop bombing Ukraine, after the worst assault on Kyiv in months.

The Trump administration continues to reveal that the so-called peace deal it wants to broker between Russia and Ukraine is just a way to force the latter to give up more land and resources. It’s not a deal, it’s not a ceasefire, it’s a shakedown.

Russian propagandists were practically giddy as they celebrated top U.S. officials—including Donald Trump—bending to the Kremlin’s demands.

“No one could have imagined we would live to see the day where the correct answer about to whom Crimea belongs would come from the president of the United States, and he will not only give it but will also teach the president of Ukraine what this correct answer is,” said business daily Kommersant writer Sergey Strokan on the Russian broadcast program 60 Minutes Wednesday night.

“April 23, 2025, can be confidently written into textbooks on modern history as a special date,” Strokan said. “It changed many things.”

State Secretary Marco Rubio spontaneously pulled out of Ukraine peace talks Wednesday after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy plainly rejected a U.S.-backed deal that would permanently hand over Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation since 2014, to Russia.

“Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea,” Zelenskiy said at a press conference in Kyiv Tuesday. “There’s nothing to talk about here. This is against our Constitution.”

But Trump’s response to the land debate was seen as a massive win for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies. In a post on Truth Social Wednesday, Trump claimed that the territory was “lost years ago” and “and is not even a point of discussion” in the peace talks. Trump further threatened that Zelenskiy should give up Crimea or risk “losing the whole Country,” and said that the Ukrainian leader’s rejection of the peace deal would “do nothing but prolong the ‘killing field.’”

The Russian talking heads interpreted that message in just one way: that the U.S. had rescinded its international military dominance and aligned itself with Moscow, practically signing Ukraine’s death warrant and that of Europe’s protection along with it.

“The United States may withdraw its entire military contingent from Europe and remove American tactical nuclear weapons from the European NATO bases,” predicted military expert Igor Korotchenko. “We will see a totally new political reality, when Europe will be left one-on-one with Russia.”

Another state-backed TV show, The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, saw its host “prancing and grinning” as the U.S. cowered in submission, according to The Daily Beast.

Allowing Russia to keep Crimea is an incredible reversal of long-standing U.S. policy—and comes as a new approach for the Trump administration. In 2018, Trump’s former State Secretary Mike Pompeo called Russia to end its annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.

But in a White House press conference Thursday, Trump couldn’t muster a coherent explanation for the switch-up, only further deflecting responsibility for the ongoing conflict.

“This isn’t my war. This is Biden’s war,” Trump said. Earlier on Thursday—nearly 100 days into his second term—Trump had resorted to begging Putin to end the violence.

During the press briefing, Trump further claimed that Russia had offered major concessions in a possible peace deal. Those concessions, however, amounted to “stopping taking the whole country.”

“Pretty big concession,” Trump added.

Donald Trump is targeting a massive Democratic fundraising tool in an upcoming presidential memorandum banning foreign donations in U.S. elections, according to reporting from Politico.

Donations platform ActBlue, which almost all Democratic candidates use in both primary and general elections, has often been criticized by Republicans—without evidence—for what they see as fraudulent donations from foreign actors. Republican Representative Bryan Steil ordered ActBlue to turn over its records in October and found nothing of the sort. There was actually evidence of ActBlue’s new program for automatic rejections of donations from foreign nationals.

ActBlue raised $400 million in the first three months of 2025, and Trump’s order would effectively choke off donations to the Democratic Party.

“Nothing will deter or interrupt ActBlue’s mission and work to enable millions of Americans to participate in our democracy. There is an ongoing and persistent effort to weaken the confidence of the American people in what’s possible. This is the next version of ‘the big lie,’” ActBlue CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones wrote in an email on Wednesday. “More than 28 million Americans participate in our democracy through our platform. We are not going to sit back idly and let their voices be silenced.… It is time for us to unify—as Americans—and create a powerful blue wall to fight against the creeping despotism of the Right, and to win back power in Washington D.C and the halls of government across the country.”

Trump’s presidential memorandum has yet to be released.

For anyone still doubting whether Donald Trump is contemplating a third term, consider that the president is currently selling “Trump 2028” hats.

The red caps were spotted on the online Trump store retailing for $50 a pop.

“Make a statement with this Made in America Trump 2028 hat. Fully embroidered with a snap closure in the back, this will become your new go-to hat,” the item description reads.

Trump has been continually suggesting the idea of running for a third term since he was on the campaign trail last year, but last month, the president insisted he was actually “not joking” about staying in power.  

During a phone call with NBC News’s Kristin Welker, the president said that he was actually very serious about potentially circumventing the Constitution in order to lead the country for another four years after his second term ends.

“No, no I’m not joking. I’m not joking,” the president said during a call in which he agreed with Welker that one such plan to keep him in office involved having Vice President JD Vance front the next Republican presidential ticket with Trump as his number two—roles that they would then switch once back in office.

“That’s one. But there are others too. There are others,” Trump said, refusing to clarify what the other plans are.

Another seemingly far-fetched idea, which involves altering the Constitution in order to keep Trump in power, would require the consent of most of the country. But that’s only if the president intends to lean on traditional methods, such as an election, to stay in the Oval Office.

As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

A federal judge ruled Thursday to block parts of Donald Trump’s executive order last month attempting to overhaul elections and voting processes. 

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted a preliminary injunction to halt several of the order’s initiatives, including requiring proof of citizenship on voter registration forms and requiring people on public assistance to have their citizenship checked before they can register to vote. 

Late last month, Democratic Party–affiliated organizations, as well as several other nonprofit groups, filed two lawsuits seeking to halt the executive order, calling it unconstitutional. Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, left other parts of the order intact, such as narrowing mail ballot deadlines.

Trump claimed in the order that the U.S. “fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections,” unlike other countries. 

“Many American elections now feature mass voting by mail, with many officials accepting ballots without postmarks or those received well after Election Day,” the order states. 

The ruling temporarily puts a roadblock against one right-wing attempt to disenfranchise voters. But another attack on voting rights, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, also seeks to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Unlike Trump’s order, though, the SAVE Act goes even further in potentially making it harder for some married women to vote, as it would require the name on a registration form to match that on proof of citizenship documents, such as birth certificates. That bill has already passed the Republican-controlled House, aided by four Democratic votes.  

Republicans have long attacked the legitimacy of any election in which they have not performed well, led by Trump. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump attacked the electoral process as “rigged,” pushing lies that “noncitizen voters” would skew the results. These claims seemed to miraculously disappear after Trump won, but conservatives are determined to right this imagined travesty. 

This story has been updated.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller gave an outrageous ultimatum during a rant attacking U.S. federal judges for upholding the rule of law in the face of Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

During an appearance on Fox News’s Hannity Wednesday, Miller railed against federal judges who told Trump that he couldn’t suspend due process in order to deport undocumented immigrants who the government alleged are members of foreign gangs.

“This is the choice facing every American: Either we all side, and get behind President Trump to remove these terrorists from our communities, or we let a rogue, radical left judiciary shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus,” Miller ranted.

Of course, the supposedly “rogue” judiciary is one that acts as a system of checks and balances on the executive branch, and the purported “radical left” lean simply refers to the courts’ independence from Trump’s abhorrent immigration agenda. Miller likes to pretend that he doesn’t understand what due process is, putting him at odds with the courts charged with upholding that, and other rights.

The Supreme Court has ordered the U.S. government to comply with a federal court order to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador due to an admitted “administrative error.” On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the return of another immigrant whose deportation to El Salvador violated a previous court settlement.

Earlier this week, Miller argued that birthright citizenship also presented a threat to national security, claiming that it had been “used by foreign governments to conduct espionage against the United States.” He provided no evidence for this claim but used it to defend Trump’s executive order upending the right outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court is expected to weigh the president’s bid to curtail birthright citizenship in May.

Elon Musk is becoming an increasingly unpopular figure in Trumpworld.

The world’s richest man got into a screaming match last week with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a dispute about the Internal Revenue Service, several witnesses told Axios.

“It was two billionaire, middle-aged men thinking it was WWE in the hall of the West Wing,” one source said of the argument, which took place last Thursday. “They were not physical in the Oval, but the president saw it, and then they carried it down the hall, and that’s when they did it again.”

Another source described the row as “quite a scene.”

“It was loud. And I mean, loud,” the second source told Axios.

At one point, things got so bad that an aide had to step between the two men to separate them. Two sources who overheard the argument said that Bessent shouted, “Fuck you.”

Musk shot back, “Say it louder.”

Musk and Bessent’s relationship has been tense at best. The Tesla CEO lobbied hard to land Howard Lutnick as the Treasury chief, but Trump chose the mild-mannered Bessent to lead the agency instead. The men have also disagreed recently over who would run the IRS (Bessent ultimately prevailed in that fight).

But even the quiet, behind-the-scenes numbers guy “has his limits” and can “roar,” per one Bessent ally that spoke with Axios.

“Scott can’t stand” Musk, the source told Axios. “That goes pretty deep and pretty far back. But he’s acting like a grown-up about it.”

News of the clash came mere weeks after reports boiled out of the White House that several senior Trump officials practically hated the tech billionaire, finding him abrasive, unfunny, and pompous—with some describing Musk as the “most irritating person” they’d “ever had to deal with.”

“I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he’s not funny. Like, at all,” a senior Trump official told Rolling Stone earlier this month. “He makes these jokes and little asides and smiles and then looks almost hurt if you don’t lap up his humor. I keep using the word ‘annoying’; a lot of people who have to deal with him do. But the word doesn’t do the situation justice. Elon just thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room and acts like it, even when it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Maybe that’s why Musk unceremoniously announced Tuesday that he would return his focus to Tesla following a jaw-dropping first-quarter report that found the electric carmaker’s profits had plummeted by 71 percent.

For anyone on the inside counting the days until Musk’s work with the federal government is formally over: The billionaire’s special government employee status is slated to expire next month.

The Trump administration is planning to further cripple the Social Security Administration by making it easier to fire thousands of the agency’s employees.

The agency’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, told SSA staff earlier this month that many of their jobs would be converted to Schedule F positions, a new classification that would strip these workers of civil service protections. The move has prompted litigation from one of the unions representing SSA employees, the American Federation of Government Employees, who argue that the new classification is misplaced.

“We are line employees to use the phrase in the Administration’s fact sheet, and we should have been excluded from any Schedule F plan,” an AFGE representative wrote in an email to its members. “This is a massive overreach by the Agency that is inconsistent with the Administration’s own guidance.… In the meantime, employees should continue to do great work on behalf of the American people, as they have been.”

The move would make it easier for thousands of employees to be terminated, according to the AFGE representative’s email. It’s the latest blow to the SSA, which provides $1.5 trillion in benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans.

In recent weeks, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has made deep cuts to the agency, resulting in website crashes, regional office managers being forced to answer phone calls at front desks, and millions of benefit recipients being prevented from accessing their oline accounts.

Over 7,000 SSA workers were laid off in February thanks to DOGE, sending the agency into a death spiral. The gutting of Social Security has terrified Americans, with polls showing worry about the benefits program at its highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s all part of Musk and the Trump administration’s plans. The tech oligarch has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and spread lies that the program is a magnet for waste and fraud. The conservative manifesto Project 2025 also lays out plans to scale back the program and cut its benefits. With Republicans controlling Congress, can anything stop the destruction of a lifeline to millions of Americans?

Donald Trump’s administration is now attempting to smear the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.”

During an interview on Newsmax’s Wake Up America Thursday, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin criticized Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who’d been forced to move her family to a safe house after the DHS posted a document that included her full address.

McLaughlin tried to claim that the government hadn’t done anything wrong by posting the documents.

“These were publicly accessible documents,” she said. “It wasn’t just the Department of Homeland Security that had them, it’s any member of the American public can go out to a courthouse and get these documents. So to try to lay that at our feet is just inaccurate.”

But McLaughlin took it a step further, attempting to sow doubt about Vasquez Sura’s “sob story.”

“I think it’s important to point to her credibility, a number of times, including that in her own written testimony she said she feared her husband,” McLaughlin said. The document the government had posted containing the family’s address was a protective order that Vasquez Sura had sought against her husband but then abandoned.

“She said that he abused her, that he ripped off her shirt, that he slapped her, that he was scratching her, that she was trying to take her children away. And now she’s pushing this sob story that they had a wonderful relationship, that they never fought,” McLaughlin said. “I think most couples fight, so, I unfortunately think this woman is burning down her own credibility as well.”

In reality, it’s McLaughlin who has undermined her own credibility in her crusade to see Abrego Garcia remain in El Salvador. Last week, she claimed in a post on X that when Abrego Garcia was arrested in 2019 for loitering, he was found with “rolls of cash.” But anyone who actually bothers to read the uncompelling police documents would know that the hoodie he was wearing at the time had cash printed on it.

It should come as no surprise that McLaughlin was completely mischaracterizing Vasquez Sura’s statement about the abandoned protective order against her husband.

“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution following a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order, in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement to multiple outlets Wednesday. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process. We were able to work through the situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling.

“Our marriage only grew stronger in the years that followed. No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. But that is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from removal. Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him,” the statement read.

Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, is currently staying in an undisclosed location with her three children as the U.S. government makes continued attempts to flout a Supreme Court order requiring that it “facilitate” the return of her husband. Vasquez Sura has found herself at the center of a political firestorm with far-reaching implications, as both the Trump administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele insist that Abrego Garcia will not be coming back to the U.S.