In the weeks before the 2016 election, Trump, down in the polls, repeatedly warned about the election being rigged. He urged his supporters not only to vote but also to be on the lookout for fraud (which, the candidate neglected to mention, is vanishingly rare). “You’ve got to get everybody to go out and watch, and go out and vote,” Trump bellowed at a rally in Akron. “And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?”1 It was just the type of inflammatory rhetoric that would come to define Trump’s presidency. His supporters heeded his call to action. The provocateur Roger Stone recruited volunteers to loiter outside polling places in Ohio and elsewhere.
The state’s Democratic Party sued the Trump campaign in federal court in Cleveland, seeking a restraining order blocking these “poll watchers” from intimidating voters. The lawyer for the Democrats said Trump was using “racially charged calls for actions by people who will act like vigilantes.”2 The Trump campaign’s defense lawyer was Chad Readler, the Jones Day partner who had argued that kids should be eligible for the death penalty. Now he asserted that Trump was innocently urging citizens to take advantage of their constitutionally protected rights—he wasn’t inciting anyone. Candidates like Trump, Readler wrote in a court filing, “are perfectly within their rights to encourage their supporters to serve as poll watchers.”3 That was hard to dispute, but was it what Trump was really encouraging?
The funny thing was that, at about the same time, a number of associates in Jones Day’s Washington office had sought clearance to serve as outside lawyers or poll watchers for Democratic campaigns. Historically, these requests had been a formality. There was a long tradition of lawyers volunteering their time to do things like this for candidates from both parties. This time, though, at least a few were told to stand down. (One lawyer told me she decided to risk her job for the sake of volunteering in Clinton’s war room. She spent election night fretting about what would happen if Jones Day found out she was there.)
Back in Cleveland, a federal judge called a hearing on the lawsuit against the Trump campaign. Readler again protested that Trump’s rhetoric about the dangers of voter fraud—unfounded and in bad faith as it might have been—was constitutionally protected speech. The judge, James Gwin, seemed to smell bullshit. Did Readler truly believe, “as an officer of the court, that there is such a thing as voter fraud that impacts elections?” Readler hemmed and hawed before eventually mustering a reply. “Your honor,” he said, “I don’t know. I’m not a political scientist.”4
Judge Gwin issued a restraining order. The next day, at Readler’s urging, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati voided it. Roger Stone’s activists were free to stand sentry outside polling stations. In the end, it was only the principle and the precedent that would matter. Trump carried Ohio by more than 400,000 votes.
On Election Night, Ben Ginsberg was at MSNBC’s studios at 30 Rockefeller Center. The newsroom was a buzzing blur of caffeinated energy. Ginsberg was on standby to go on-air to discuss the results. He and Bob Bauer, who had been Obama’s White House counsel, were paired together, and they sat waiting at desks outside a glass-walled studio.
The two men had known each other for years. During the 2012 election, Ginsberg had represented Romney, and Bauer was working for Obama. Even as the two campaigns warred, things had remained cordial enough that Ginsberg agreed to share a stage with Bauer at a retreat for Perkins Coie, the liberal law firm where Bauer was a partner. Onstage in a hotel ballroom in downtown D.C., the two had chatted amicably about what it’s like representing a presidential campaign. At one point, in response to a question, Ginsberg said something that surprised the Perkins partners. There might not be political law practices at big law firms in the future, he predicted. Representing politicians tended to spoil relationships with more lucrative clients, namely companies. What was the upside to attaching your firm’s name to a politician that half the country would dislike?
Yet four years later, here Ginsberg was, working at a firm that had staked so much on the most polarizing major-party nominee in recent memory. As Ginsberg and Bauer sat together in the MSNBC hive, producers and data guys, in a state of increasing agitation, kept coming by to warn that Trump might pull it off. Some were cursing, others were crying, and Ginsberg, deep in liberal territory, did his best to keep a poker face.
Late that night, he dialed McGahn. He was at Trump Tower, trying to keep in touch with lawyers who were stationed all over the country, monitoring results and preparing to fight recounts in a few states.5 By the time he and Ginsberg connected, Trump had been declared the winner. McGahn sounded overwhelmed—like the rational, analytical side of his brain was fighting a losing battle to regain control from the emotional side, which was in hyperdrive. Ginsberg, too, felt a bit disoriented. Nobody had expected this outcome.
The next day, the world began coming to terms with what had just happened. In Jones Day’s Washington office—home to plenty of liberals, notwithstanding the firm’s embrace of conservative causes—some associates were in tears. It wasn’t just that they were upset Trump had won. They were mortified by their employer’s role in helping him. They felt complicit. It undercut their faith in Jones Day—and maybe, if they dared to admit it, in themselves, too.
The reality was that in the twenty-four preceding hours, nothing had changed about the nature of Jones Day’s work for Trump. If he had lost, as everyone had anticipated, these idealistic attorneys wouldn’t have been enduring the same moral and ethical reckoning. They would have done their best to forget this unpleasant episode, and they would have prayed that it didn’t hurt the reputation of the firm to which they had yoked their own reputations, and then they would have gotten back to their day jobs, fending off threats to big companies’ profits.
But Trump hadn’t lost, and it was in no small part a result of Jones Day’s work. The firm had helped professionalize a fly-by-night operation. It had plugged Trump into the Republican establishment. It had stabilized an unbalanced campaign by helping devise and create The List. It had neutralized lawsuits and ballot-access challenges. Would Trump have won absent Jones Day’s assistance? Perhaps. But the long odds would have been even longer.
These doleful associates didn’t know it at the time, but the orbits of Trump and Jones Day were about to achieve greater synchronicity than ever. The law firm had helped Trump seize the White House; soon it would help him govern.
That same Wednesday in November, Ginsberg’s phone began ringing. He was getting call after call from people who hoped to position themselves for jobs in the Trump administration. Rather than trying to get the attention of folks inside the campaign madhouse, they figured it would be simpler to go straight to a well-connected lawyer at Jones Day.
In the weeks ahead, McGahn’s phone kept buzzing, too. He would step into a hallway or excuse himself from a meeting to field questions or instructions from the incoming commander in chief. Then, one day around Thanksgiving, Trump was on the line, and he didn’t have a question or an instruction. He had an announcement. “You’re coming to the White House,” the president-elect informed his lawyer. “You’re White House counsel.”
Here it was: McGahn’s reward for nearly two years of loyal service to a man whom many would have long since abandoned. McGahn was prepared. He told Trump that he would be honored to take the job, on one condition: He needed to have complete control over the process of selecting federal judges. That would be a break from the tradition in previous administrations, where a committee of experts tended to debate the merits, substantively and politically, of various judicial candidates.6
The bargain had been Mitch McConnell’s idea. About a week after the election, the Senate majority leader had phoned McGahn to plot strategy; there were more than one hundred judicial vacancies, because McConnell had been refusing to hold votes on Obama’s nominees. (When Obama entered office, there had been half as many unfilled judgeships.7) “Just do this yourself,” McConnell advised McGahn. “Don’t have a committee. Don’t get in all this bureaucracy.”8
Not one to be hemmed in by tradition, Trump agreed.9 Now McGahn was poised to wield immense power, and his law firm was positioned to reap the spoils.
The Trump campaign hadn’t done much to prepare for governing. For a brief spell, the hapless Chris Christie oversaw the presidential transition. Christie, the former New Jersey governor, had not long ago nurtured his own White House ambitions, hiring Jones Day to represent his campaign and blowing nearly $50,000 on legal fees. Now he was in the awkward position of working for a man whom he had fiercely opposed. It didn’t take long for Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to plant a knife in his back. With Christie gone, the task of preparing for a new administration fell in part to Jones Day.
The firm’s lawyers were responsible for identifying and scrubbing candidates for many positions in the White House and Justice Department.10 The work was unpaid. Why was Jones Day willing to do it? For bragging rights, in part. But it also provided the firm with a unique opportunity to seed a new administration with its own staff.
About a month after the election, a Jones Day lawyer named John Gore contacted a bunch of associates. Gore was a recently minted partner in the Issues & Appeals group. He needed to enlist a small army of associates to work on filling federal jobs. It was largely grunt work: running background checks and scouring resumés and public filings for all the people in contention for the political posts.
To the surprise of some associates, Gore told them that the assignment was pro bono. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee both had money, and the presidential transition had a government budget; pro bono work was usually reserved for clients that couldn’t easily afford to pay. More than one associate complained to a partner who helped oversee pro bono work at the firm. She agreed that this was inappropriate; it certainly wasn’t consistent with the American Bar Association’s definition of pro bono work.*11 It also felt overtly political. The partner flagged the issue to her boss, who flagged it to D.C. leadership. The answer came back: Stop whining.
To be sure, there were other large law firms that also lent their credibility to Trump—sometimes with embarrassing results. Morgan Lewis, for example, was hired to devise a plan to isolate the president-elect from his businesses once he took office. In January 2017, a Morgan Lewis partner, Sheri Dillon, joined Trump at a press conference in the flag-festooned lobby of Trump Tower and assured everyone that there was nothing to worry about. Next to the lectern was a table stacked with what Dillon implied were documents related to Trump’s businesses. Reporters at the event noticed that the papers all appeared to be blank.12
But Jones Day had done more than any other firm to help form the new administration, lining up dozens of people to assume senior positions. And lo and behold, many of those people came from the same place: Jones Day.
In the White House counsel’s office, McGahn would be surrounded with his colleagues.13 Greg Katsas, a Jones Day partner who helped lead the Justice Department’s transition planning, would be his deputy. Annie Donaldson, who had followed McGahn from Patton Boggs, would be his chief of staff. Three other Jones Day employees—James Burnham, David Morrell, and Blake Delaplane—would be heading there, too. Bill McGinley landed the White House job of cabinet secretary.
The Justice Department would also be jammed with Jones Day lawyers, including Noel Francisco, John Gore, and Chad Readler. Readler soon brought on Brinton Lucas, a Jones Day associate.14 Mike Murray, a Jones Day partner in Chicago, became counsel to the deputy attorney general. The crucial job of running the department’s civil rights division would go to Eric Dreiband, who recently had helped defend Abercrombie & Fitch’s refusal to hire a seventeen-year-old Muslim whose head scarf violated the company’s “classic East Coast collegiate style,” as Jones Day put it.15
There were more. At the Commerce Department, a Jones Day lawyer, James Uthmeier, became a special adviser to the secretary, Wilbur Ross, whose company was a Jones Day client.16 (Uthmeier would later become chief of staff to Florida governor Ron DeSantis.) Stephen Vaden, who also had joined Jones Day from Patton Boggs, became a special assistant to the secretary of the Department of Agriculture.
Any new presidential administration draws heavily from the partnerships of major corporate law firms, and Jones Day attorneys had previously served under Obama and other presidents. But what transpired at the dawn of the Trump era was an extraordinary transfer of talent from a single law firm to a new administration. “I don’t know of a precedent,” Ted Olson, who’d served as George W. Bush’s solicitor general, said.17 For Jones Day, it marked the moment the firm achieved a position of unique, historical dominance in Washington, after decades of swelling ambition. Sixteen years earlier, Jones Day had proudly announced that a grand total of three partners had been tapped to join the Bush administration.18 Now there were more than a dozen—and the ranks would soon grow.
Brogan made it financially worthwhile for his lawyers to join the new administration. Jones Day generally didn’t award bonuses—lawyers’ compensation was set a year in advance, based on their and the firm’s expected performance. Now, though, Brogan handed out special payments to at least some of the lawyers who were entering the government. Greg Katsas received a bonus—“at the discretion of its managing partner,” as he explained in a government filing—that brought his compensation to nearly $4 million for the year. Francisco reported getting an “earnings supplement” that inflated his pay to $4.6 million. And James Burnham, an associate, received a bonus that roughly doubled his pay to $810,000.
Jones Day’s partnership agreement permitted Brogan to make these payments.19 But as word of them trickled out, some Jones Day lawyers were agog. “Oh, I don’t think that’s true,” one said to colleagues who mentioned Burnham’s payday.20
“Yeah, it’s true,” a partner replied. When some lawyers went into the government, “the firm, meaning Brogan,” handed out bonuses.
“The firm sees it as prestigious for those people to move into the administration, so they all got a bump,” another partner explained. Brogan was “making their transition from the law firm life to the public life easier. . . . That was just a nice little cushion.”
A day or two after Jones Day hosted the rooftop going-away party for McGahn and others headed into the administration, the incoming White House counsel took his seat on a black folding chair on the main platform of the inauguration stage. Nearly a year had passed since McGahn had stood behind Trump at the New Hampshire victory speech. Now he was among Trump’s family members, past and future cabinet officers, former presidents, and bigwigs from both parties and the military. As Trump delivered his “American Carnage” speech, a drizzle dampened McGahn’s bare head.
A quarter of a mile away, Jones Day hosted another reception. Every four years, the firm threw an inauguration event on the roof terrace.21 This time, a memo had gone out to Jones Day lawyers in D.C.: There are a limited number of spots, let us know if you want to bring a client. A couple of weeks passed, and another memo came, reminding folks to put their names on the list. A week later, another reminder. It turned out that not many people in the office were excited to witness Trump’s inauguration.
Jones Day instead partnered with a women’s networking group, Ellevate, to hold an “open house.” “Light meals and refreshments”—including mimosas and Bloody Marys—were available from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.22 Fewer than a hundred people showed up (not counting the black-clad Secret Service agents who prowled the roof with guns and long-lensed binoculars). Ellevate members mixed with a smattering of Jones Day lawyers and clients, including Mike Carvin and Noel Francisco23 and some energy executives from Texas.*
On this wet, gray day, the outdoor terrace wasn’t enticing. People mostly clumped at tables inside a room named for Welch Pogue, who had so abhorred influence peddling in Washington. It was a genteel crowd, not a MAGA hat in sight. “It felt like a Georgetown cocktail party,” one guest told me. Shortly after Trump finished his speech, a marine helicopter carrying the Obamas thundered over the subdued party on its way out of town.