It’s a Liberal Thing

WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES PROSECUTIONS FOR DISHONEST STAFF; WASHINGTON RUNS OUT OF LAWYERS TO DEFEND THEM, THEN REMEMBERS IT HAS ONLY TWO TO PROSECUTE THEM

WASHINGTON — The President announced Thursday that officials in his administration who are dishonest “have to be prosecuted,” a policy that within the day had run into a problem of supply. Nearly every white-collar defense lawyer in Washington has already been retained by an official in his administration, and the Justice Department office responsible for prosecuting corrupt public officials currently has two attorneys.

“I want my people to be honest, and if they’re not going to be honest, they have to be prosecuted,” the President told reporters on the South Lawn. “I view it as, if people are not honest, they’re stealing from me as President. So I want my people to be honest. And if they’re not honest, I’ll have my DOJ go and do whatever they have to do.” Asked about the specific investigation that prompted the question, he said he did not know much about it.

The investigation, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, began with a criminal referral from the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security. It concerns Corey Lewandowski, who served as the top adviser and de facto chief of staff to Secretary Kristi Noem. Under an internal policy, every DHS contract and grant over $100,000 required Noem’s approval, and Lewandowski served as her gatekeeper. Investigators concluded in July that they had evidence he improperly steered or approved contracts as an unpaid special government employee; internal records show him approving a multimillion-dollar equipment contract, despite Noem having told Congress that he had no role in approving contracts, and contractors told White House officials they had been asked to pay Lewandowski in connection with department business. Lewandowski and Noem both left the department in March. His lawyer denies any wrongdoing.

The President’s remarks arrived in a season of such matters — including the resignation of an ambassador amid allegations that she pressured a donor to pay off her $100,000 American Express debt — and the defense bar has been preparing for it all year. The Journal reported this week that senior officials, including from the White House communications and counsel’s offices, began meeting in the spring to plan for investigations, and that officials have been scrambling to lock in preferred counsel before colleagues do. The reason is arithmetic: conflict-of-interest rules generally prevent one law firm from representing several officials whose interests might diverge, which in a single administration they reliably do. “If they have been supportive of this administration, they know there is a possibility that there is a target on their back,” said Steve Roberts, a partner at Lex Politica, a firm catering to conservative clients. His firm is not the only one fielding calls. Cooley, which has some 1,400 lawyers, reports an influx of corporate clients — companies that donated to the President’s projects, did business with the government, or did business with the President’s family.

Washington’s defense firms now maintain waiting lists, ordered informally by the seniority of the official seeking counsel, and conflicts checks — the preliminary review of whether a firm may take a client at all — have become the bottleneck of the process, in some cases taking longer than the events under investigation. Junior staffers, priced and conflicted out of the first tier, have been advised to retain counsel early and individually, since a shared lawyer is not a saving but a conflict. “There is no shortage of lawyers in Washington,” one prominent defense attorney said. “There is a shortage of lawyers who have not already been retained by somebody in this administration.”

On the prosecution side of the ledger, capacity is also spoken for. The Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department was created in 1976, after Watergate, to prosecute corruption by public officials; it employed more than thirty prosecutors at the end of the previous administration. It now has two full-time attorneys. The section no longer brings cases of its own — its docket was transferred to U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country — which makes the arithmetic of the President’s policy straightforward: every dishonest official is to be prosecuted, by a department whose corruption unit could field a doubles team, against defendants defended by what is left of the Washington bar.

What is left of the Washington bar, it turns out, is the Justice Department’s own alumni. The one deep bench of experienced litigators in the capital with no conflicts to clear is the corps of career attorneys who left or were removed from the department over the past two years, many of them now in private practice. They have begun receiving the calls that the established firms cannot take — from officials of the administration that dismissed them, inquiring about representation against investigations by the department they used to work for, in cases that would be overseen, staffing permitting, by the two attorneys who stayed.

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