| | | |  | | By Ankush Khardori | | Presented by |  | | | With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine Good Sunday morning. This is Ankush Khardori, wishing Pope Francis well after being discharged from a hospital in Rome today. Get in touch.
|  | DRIVING THE DAY | | | 
A new White House memo directs AG Pam Bondi “to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation” against the government. | Ben Curtis/AP Photo | A NEW FRONTIER: Donald Trump’s political agenda may be hitting obstacles in the courts, but this weekend, the president took another unprecedented step in his campaign to punish his longtime legal adversaries and deter others from joining the fray. A White House memo issued yesterday directs AG Pam Bondi “to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation” against the government, and also instructs Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “to prioritize enforcement” of regulations governing attorney conduct in immigration courts. Trump is “doubling down on his threats against the American legal system,” writes POLITICO’s Ali Bianco, as he takes “an increasingly adversarial stance toward the legal system, including both judges who have ruled against his policies and lawyers and firms that he has viewed as wronging him.” Here’s NYT’s coverage, which calls the edict “menacing.” The practical impact of the memo is narrow but still significant. The big takeaways include:
- Directing Bondi to seek court sanctions or refer attorneys to state bars for misconduct in litigation — actions that are unusual for government lawyers but that still require the approval of independent third parties;
- Directing Bondi to consider “imputing the ethical misconduct of junior attorneys to partners or the law firm when appropriate” — a directive that could hamper pro bono litigation at large law firms, which often let junior attorneys take the lead in smaller matters (like individual asylum cases) to gain litigation experience;
- Empowering Bondi to work with the White House to yank the security clearances for lawyers with firms that she deems to have run afoul of the rules — a move that would limit the firms’ ability to work on cases involving classified information, though cases like that tend to make up a very small portion of work at large law firms; and
- Directing Bondi to identify misconduct in litigation against the government over the last eight years — which, presumably not coincidentally, encompasses Trump’s first term.
Not surprisingly, the memo has already sparked widespread criticism among liberal lawyers, including Marc Elias (who was called out by name in the memo), Sherrilyn Ifill and the ACLU. The memo also intensifies perhaps the biggest question that emerged in the wake of the law firm Paul, Weiss’ roundly criticized capitulation to Trump last week: Who’s next on Trump’s list of legal targets? (Disclosure: Your Playbooker worked at Paul, Weiss years ago and was not surprised by the deal.)
| | | | A message from Comcast: Comcast invests billions each year in maintaining and expanding our network capabilities to deliver a superior experience each and every day for millions of people. We've invested $80B in our network and infrastructure in the last 10 years. Connecting people now and into the future. Learn more. | | | | Make no mistake about it: The Trump administration’s efforts to chill opposition among the elite legal class are working. Even before the Paul, Weiss deal, lawyers at major law firms in New York and Washington were struggling to find ways to collectively push back against the Trump administration’s efforts to punish disfavored law firms, which began with Covington & Burling and Perkins Coie. Trump’s deal with the firm spurred phone calls and text messages across the elite legal class — many expressing shock and concern, and a relative few taking modest pleasure in the public blowback (which could prove to be a business opportunity for competitors looking to poach clients). Democratic legal strategist David Axelrod also posited that the deal could have more direct political effects on the Democratic Party by deterring lawyers at large firms from campaign fundraising. There have also been murmurs about how Trump effectively extorted the firm — both in the colloquial and legal senses of the word. We offer no legal opinion on the subject except to note that (1) Trump is practically immune from criminal prosecution, both now and in the future, and (2) for those who are curious, the Justice Department has some general guidance on the subject. Still, virtually no one with any long-term standing in the private legal community is willing to speak publicly about it, partly out of fear that they or their firms could wind up in Trump’s crosshairs. We hate to disappoint many of our colleagues in the media, but for better or worse, pretty much no one in this space cares about the views of a junior corporate associate from an entirely different law firm. The anxiety is palpable, particularly among lawyers familiar with government investigations that cast a wide net looking for alleged wrongdoers in the corporate sector — which, in broad conceptual strokes, is not that different from Trump’s apparent dragnet in the private legal sector. Defense lawyers with experience doing that work know an important, if unstated, principle: The first company to settle with the government usually gets the best deal. The price for a settlement tends only to go up, which suggests that any firm that follows Paul, Weiss’ lead and tries to negotiate with Trump is likely to pay a steeper price than they did. The upshot of all this is that although Trump may be hitting roadblocks in the courts, he continues to develop and deploy a variety of tactics for tamping down liberal opposition to his agenda both in and outside the courtroom — not just the targeting of law firms, but with his offensive against elite universities, attacks on the media and multiple ongoing leak investigations. Who knows what the week ahead will bring? Speaking of legal threats: The Justice Department is taking early steps to look into whether it can slap criminal charges on U.S. Institute of Peace employees who tried to stop the Department of Government Efficiency takeover, The Daily Caller’s Thomas English scooped.
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Connecting Americans – now and into the future. Learn more. | | | | SUNDAY BEST … — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on what will happen if Trump flouts judicial rulings, on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “Look, this is an extraordinary moment. It does require extraordinary action. If he defies the Supreme Court, then we are in uncharted territory that we haven’t been in for a very long time, and our entire democracy — this whole beautiful enterprise of democracy that we’ve had for over 240 years — is at risk. And look, I believe that if Donald Trump should defy the courts, the public will rise up. Democrats will fight it in every single way. … It will trigger a mass movement from one end of the country to the other.” — Border czar Tom Homan on the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador without due process whose families say they weren’t gang members, on ABC’s “This Week”: “They can make those claims, and of course, we have the information that says the complete opposite.” Jon Karl: “Will you release that information?” Homan: “That will be litigated in the courts with this judge, I’m not gonna get into every specific case. … We gotta count on the men and women who do this every day for a living, who designated these people as a member of [Tren de Aragua].” — Special envoy Steve Witkoff on the war in Ukraine, on “Fox News Sunday”: “I think in my 68 years on this Earth, I’ve never ever seen a situation where there isn’t two sides to a story. It’s just never as black and white as people want to portray. So there are grievances on both sides. … I just don’t see that [Russian President Vladimir Putin] wants to take all of Europe. This is a much different situation than it was in World War II. In World War II, there was no NATO. … I take him at his word in this sense … The [U.S.] agenda is: Stop the killing.” — Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) on long-term concerns about entitlements’ insolvency, on “Meet the Press”: “We’re not being honest either with people, and that’s why you’ll actually see me in a couple of months introduce a change to Social Security. We’re not being honest when we look people in the eye and say we’re not going to touch it. If we don’t touch it, it touches itself.” TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
| | | | Cut through policy complexity and turn intelligence into action with POLITICO’s Policy Intelligence Assistant—a new suite of tools designed to save you time and demonstrate your impact more easily than ever—available only to Pro subscribers. Save hours, uncover critical insights instantly, and stay ahead of the next big shift. Power your strategy today—learn more. | | | | | 9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR 1. SIREN: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has saved 25 million lives, is now itself “on life support,” POLITICO’s Carmen Paun reports. Public health experts warn that ending PEPFAR quickly could lead to 6 million people dying just over the course of Trump’s term. The program started by George W. Bush has long enjoyed strong bipartisan support. But Trump’s foreign aid freeze — and GOP concerns about a bit of the funding going to groups that perform abortions — has “key congressional Republicans broaching what was once unthinkable: ending PEPFAR.” The law expires next week, though Congress has appropriated its funds through the end of the fiscal year. 2. TRADE WARS: “Liberation Day” is coming April 2, but Trump’s reciprocal tariffs may not be quite as massive as originally thought, Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove reports. Some countries are now expected to be exempted, and no other tariffs on specific industries are expected to be announced at the same time (as of current planning). That reflects in part how the tariff-fueled market downturn “has hung heavy” over the White House. Still, it’ll be “a much broader push than in his first term and will test the appetite of markets for uncertainty and a raft of import taxes.” 3. IMMIGRATION FILES: The IRS and ICE are getting close to an arrangement for immigration authorities to use taxpayer data to find undocumented immigrants, WaPo’s Jacob Bogage and Jeff Stein scooped. It would be a major change for tax information that has typically been closely guarded and seen as confidential; IRS career officials warn that the deal “risks abusing a narrow and seldom-used section of privacy law that’s meant to help investigators build criminal cases, not enforce criminal penalties.” The agency has long told undocumented immigrants, about half of whom file income tax returns, that they won’t be jeopardized by doing so. All eyes on Venezuela: Caracas said it will again begin receiving deportation flights of Venezuelans from the U.S. today, Bloomberg reports. The two countries have seemingly struck a deal for Chevron to keep operating in Venezuela for another month, ending President Nicolás Maduro’s pause on flights. Time’s Philip Holsinger has must-see photos and stories of the Venezuelan men the U.S. deported to El Salvador: “There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear.” The complete U.S. secrecy about the disappeared deportees has left their families in “nearly unprecedented” darkness, WaPo’s Arelis Hernández and María Luisa Paúl report. 4. ONE WAY TO GROW THE DEFICIT: “Tax revenue could drop by 10 percent amid turmoil at IRS,” by WaPo’s Jacob Bogage: “Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service … That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue … [It’s] directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.”
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Learn more about how Comcast is investing in essential infrastructure powering our lives. | | | | 5. AROUND THE WORLD: “Autocrats roll back rights and rule of law — and cite Trump’s example,” by WaPo’s Anthony Faiola: “[T]he autocratic government of [Hungarian] Prime Minister Viktor Orban stopped short of targeting the [LGBTQ+] community’s premier event: the annual Pride parade. Until now. … What changed? According to Orban, it was the return to the White House of President Donald Trump. … In Serbia, where autocratic President Aleksandar Vucic has been challenged by a sustained protest movement, authorities cited Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of rampant fraud, corruption and waste at USAID as a basis for launching raids last month against four civil society groups.” 6. EPSTEIN FILES: The FBI is scrambling through the weekend to review files related to Jeffrey Epstein ahead of a Justice Department public release demanded by many on the right, CNN’s Evan Perez and Hannah Rabinowitz report. Other investigations into China and Iran threats, among other topics, have been put on the back burner in favor of these 12-hour shifts. But the agents and top officials are “making only limited redactions that some officials worry will expose sensitive information about sex-abuse victims and witnesses,” WSJ’s Sadie Gurman and Khadeeja Safdar report. 7. THE CUTS: “Patel plans major cutback to ATF by moving as many as 1,000 agents to FBI,” by CNN’s Evan Perez and Hannah Rabinowitz: “The ATF has about 2,600 agents and more than 5,000 employees … The move is expected to begin with the reassignment of a couple hundred ATF agents to border-related criminal enforcement duty as FBI agents … After publication of this story and resulting pushback including from Republican allies, FBI officials began to back off aspects of their plan.” 8. IN THE WILDERNESS: Who will step up to lead Democrats? Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to “use your power” in the shutdown fight, CNN’s Sarah Ferris and Manu Raju report, and some House Democrats want Jeffries to step up, lay out a vision and not bend the knee to Schumer. Other prominent Democratic figures are emerging: Progressives see Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as their “clear leader” going into 2028, on the heels of her tour with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), NYT’s Reid Epstein and Katie Glueck report. And Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has sought to seize the party’s mantle with a message focused on the working class on his own statewide tour, AP’s Joey Cappelletti reports from Champaign. 9. MUSK READ: “SpaceX Positioned to Secure Billions in New Federal Contracts Under Trump,” by NYT’s Eric Lipton: “The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and [Elon] Musk’s allies and employees who now hold government positions. The company will also benefit from policies under the current Trump administration that prioritize hiring commercial space vendors for everything from communications systems to satellite fabrication.”
| | | | California's tech industry is shaping national politics like never before. We’re launching California Decoded to unpack how the state is defining tech policy and politics within its borders and beyond. Sign up now to get it free for a limited time. | | | | | | | TALK OF THE TOWN | | Conan O’Brien will get the Mark Twain Prize tonight at the Kennedy Center. Donald Trump went to the NCAA wrestling championship, traveling and sitting with Elon Musk, Markwayne Mullin, Dave McCormick, Jim Jordan and Susie Wiles. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. played tennis with Novak Djokovic. Jim Banks sent donuts to troll an Indivisible town hall. IN MEMORIAM — “Max Frankel, Top Times Editor Who Led a Newspaper in Transition, Dies at 94,” by NYT’s Robert McFadden: “Mr. Frankel landed in New York in 1940 without a word of English, a refugee in knickerbockers with European sensibilities for opera, art, languages and mathematics. But he found his calling in journalism, and it led to global news assignments, associations with world leaders, the pantheon of Pulitzer honorees and the editorships, successively, of The Times’s opinion pages and of its news coverage.” THE PRICE OF EGGS: The White House is seeking corporate sponsors for its annual Easter Egg Roll, prompting alarm among ethics experts, CNN’s Betsy Klein reports. TROLL GAETZ: Former Rep. Matt Gaetz nearly nominated the woman once widely rumored to be former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s mistress for the job McCarthy was trying desperately to get in January 2023, according to a copy of Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater’s new book out Tuesday, “Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress” ($32). That woman, Renee Ellmers, a nurse-turned-Republican congresswoman from North Carolina, hadn’t served in Congress since 2017. Ellmers was often invoked as shorthand for one of the chief reasons McCarthy blew his shot at the speakership when he first hoped to win it in 2015. Ellmers and McCarthy, both married, denied the affair rumors at the time, but the chatter was pervasive enough that it was referenced by Republican lawmakers as a reason McCarthy should be prevented from holding the post of speaker. Gaetz later denied he ever thought of doing it, but at the time it was taken so seriously by McCarthy’s inner circle that one of them even called his wife, Judy, to let her know of what might be about to occur on the floor. HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) … Theresa Winegar … Ryan Grim … POLITICO’s Paul McLeary … Suzanne Turner … Johnny DeStefano of Utility Strategic Advisors … Kevin Kallaugher … Evan Keller … Maggie Gage of OneMain Financial … Alec Gerlach … Paul Neaville of the Markham Group … Mike Franc … Shane Seaver … McKinsey’s Tara Maller … Nita Chaudhary … AFL-CIO’s Drew Waxman … former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson … Michael Caputo … APCO Worldwide’s Joanna London … Boeing’s Shaun Lara … Abby Kohlman … Alma Caballero … Ian Koski … Cole Rojewski … Keturah Hetrick … Stephanie Cuevas Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our deputy editor Zack Stanton and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.
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