On Inauguration Day, Trump’s aides filed the paperwork to formally launch his 2020 reelection campaign.1 The candidate was the same, but the campaign was different. At least in theory, it was an opportunity, if Jones Day had wanted to find one, to disembark from the Trump Train with the firm’s never-abandon-a-client principle intact. Jones Day wouldn’t be abandoning a client. It just wouldn’t be taking on a new one.
That might sound like an exercise in splitting hairs, and maybe it was, but Jones Day’s leaders—Brogan and a small group of lieutenants—did discuss whether they would accept the assignment of working for Trump 2020. It didn’t take them long to decide: Yes, they would. In some ways, this choice was nearly as momentous as the initial decision, two years earlier, to work for the first Trump campaign; the knot tying the firm to its client was now cinched even tighter.
Within weeks, Jones Day’s political law practice—missing some of its key players, who had moved into the administration—again had its hands full. There were endless meetings and conference calls and paperwork to set up the legal infrastructure for the campaign to reelect the president.
At the same time, while the ugly 2016 election was history, the lawyering associated with it was not. A presidential campaign, one of the Jones Day partners working on this told me, is like a billion-dollar startup that goes belly up. As it winds down, there is a backlog—often years—of humdrum work to do. And that is the way things work in a normal campaign, which Trump’s was not.
First and foremost, there were the various investigations into Russian interference in the election. The special counsel, Robert Mueller, as well as investigators on Capitol Hill, demanded that the campaign hand over millions of pages of emails and other documents. Before the campaign complied with these subpoenas, someone had to read all the stuff. This drudgery fell to Jones Day.2 The firm hired a consulting firm that had a secure facility capable of handling classified documents. A horde of associates and paralegals were given the thankless task of sitting in a windowless storage room and perusing documents on computers that were disconnected from the internet to ensure security. Jones Day also would handle investigators’ requests to interview campaign staffers.3 (And it would defend Trump in cases such as the FEC’s investigation into his campaign’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica, the controversial British consulting firm bankrolled by Robert Mercer.4)
With McGahn gone, Ben Ginsberg became Jones Day’s point person for the Trump campaign. Ginsberg liked to tell people that he was hardly involved with anything Trump related, and it was true that he had a couple of associates to handle much of the day-to-day. But from the time McGahn joined the White House, Trump campaign aides were regularly talking to Ginsberg, who helped them strategize about how to respond to government investigators and to keep the searches for emails as narrow as possible. Brogan, too, took part in devising plans to help Trump, his campaign, and the White House foil the various investigations—or at least get them to end as quickly and painlessly as possible.5
Jones Day could have left it at that. The firm was already irrevocably enmeshed with this unusual president—more than it ever had been, by orders of magnitude, with any president at any time in Jones Day’s long history. It was already collecting many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in fees from the campaign, making it by far the largest law-firm recipient of Trump money. But Brogan soon made a play for more work.
It had been McGahn’s idea, one of his confidants told me. He wanted to be spending his time in the White House filling the judiciary with Federalist Society judges and, to a lesser extent, dismantling the “administrative state.” Thanks to the legwork that he and his colleagues had already done vetting judicial candidates, McGahn had gotten off to a fast start. He had arranged for Trump to nominate Neil Gorsuch to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court and also had presented the president with nominees for various appeals courts. But what McGahn increasingly found himself and his team spending time on was Trump’s personal legal problems.
McGahn wanted the president to have his own, competent counsel. The investigations into Russian interference in the election and, more recently, Trump’s firing of FBI director Jim Comey were sure to drag on for a long time. (Recognizing this, White House lawyers waived ethics rules and allowed McGahn and five other ex–Jones Dayers to communicate with their former firm as they defended the president.6) McGahn had zero interest in this being part of his remit. He and Brogan discussed whether Jones Day could be brought in to run legal strategy for the White House. Brogan would play quarterback, directing the different lawyers and plotting legal strategy on the president’s behalf. Brogan was game. He met at least twice with Trump in the Oval Office to pitch Jones Day’s services.
If Brogan scored this high-profile gig, Jones Day would be representing not just the Trump campaign but also Trump himself. Even some of Brogan’s close allies told me they worried that the firm was fast approaching a point at which this would become a problem for clients. Big companies, after all, had been getting increasingly vocal about their opposition to Trump’s most extreme policies and rhetoric. Brogan’s advisers suggested that he pull back. He forged ahead. A team of Jones Day lawyers in D.C. was assigned the task of researching and tracking every angle of the Mueller investigation in anticipation of possibly getting the job. One partner, Geoff Stewart, was roped in because he had worked with Mueller in the early 1990s at a law firm that later became WilmerHale. Stewart advised his colleagues on what strategies and evidence the special prosecutor might be pursuing.
In the end, Brogan didn’t get the job. (It went instead to John Dowd.) The feeling among some senior Jones Day partners was that Trump wanted someone a bit more bombastic than Brogan as his defender-in-chief.
At first, working in the White House had been a goose-bump-inducing thrill for McGahn. He was one of a handful of staff with all-access privileges. It was an opportunity for him to give behind-the-scenes tours to friends, to show acquaintances from high school, where he’d felt a bit like an outsider, that he was now the ultimate insider. “It’s kind of a cool thing, like I’ve kind of made something of myself,” McGahn would say. Plenty of staffers could take guests on a tour; very few could escort them behind the velvet ropes that cordoned off the Oval Office. “I rated the ability to just take the rope down and say, ‘Go on in,’” McGahn marveled.7 He found himself in the unusual—if not unpleasant—situation of noticing strangers in airports scrolling through pictures of him on their phones, before mustering the courage to approach him for a photo. (The bad news was that he was once mistaken for Sean Spicer.)8
But when McGahn was interacting with his boss, he was a lot less happy. He and Trump had gotten along during the campaign, but it didn’t last. Now McGahn was one of the few White House staffers who dared stand up to the president, which didn’t go over well. “Their clashes were primal,” Michael Schmidt wrote in Donald Trump v. The United States.9 Trump would insult McGahn to his face. Behind Trump’s back, McGahn referred to the unpredictable president as “King Kong” or just “fucking Kong.”*
The bigger problem was that McGahn was growing worried about his own potential legal exposure—especially when Trump pushed him to fire Mueller. McGahn refused and contemplated quitting. He called Brogan. The president was crazy, McGahn fumed. Maybe, he ventured, he should cut his losses and return to Jones Day.
Brogan’s response was essentially: Stop whining. Being unhappy is “not a good enough reason to quit,” he said. If McGahn threw in the towel, especially so soon after joining the White House, it would look bad not just for McGahn but also for Jones Day. McGahn, who had gotten as far as packing up his office, heeded Brogan’s advice and stayed put.
Most of Jones Day’s leaders were outwardly supportive of continuing to work for Trump. It was oh-so-easy to fall back on the platitude that the courageous American law firm must never abandon a client. “We’re proud to have represented the campaign,” Glen Nager told the American Lawyer in the spring of 2017.10 “Once a client is a client of this firm, we stand with them. That’s what lawyers do. At least good lawyers.” Plus, it was what Brogan wanted, and what Brogan wanted, Brogan got.
But there was no masking the awkwardness—in part because Jones Day, for all its work for corporate lawbreakers, also had many lawyers devoted to helping those in need. The firm had a strong tradition of encouraging its attorneys to undertake ambitious community service endeavors. The most powerful example of this was a remarkable pro bono project that Brogan initiated along the U.S.-Mexico border. The firm would send lawyers down to Texas and other states to help undocumented immigrants as they awaited deportation hearings. Until Jones Day arrived in 2014, very few of the migrants had real legal representation. The firm’s attorneys would spend a week or two on the border, assessing whether the migrants had valid asylum claims and, for those who did, representing them in the chaotic immigration courts.
In early 2017—just as Trump was taking office—Jones Day broadened this effort into what became the Laredo Project.11 The city of Laredo, Texas, was home to private detention centers where women and unaccompanied minors were locked up. Jones Day booked a block of rooms on the top floor of the boutique La Posada Hotel, and scores of lawyers cycled through, representing hundreds of women and children and giving “Know Your Rights” presentations to thousands of inmates.12 There were often ten Jones Day lawyers down there simultaneously—a huge investment of the firm’s time and money. (Jones Day says its lawyers have dedicated nearly $200 million worth of billable hours to the project.)13 The law firm even hired investigators and lawyers in Central America to look for evidence to corroborate clients’ asylum claims. So impressive was the initiative that some Jones Day clients sent their in-house lawyers down to Laredo to participate.14
It was an inspiring sight: elite lawyers standing shoulder to shoulder with frightened immigrants on the cusp of being deported back to the lands from which they’d fled violence and persecution—and regularly securing their freedom. In dozens of cases where Jones Day lawyers won asylum for clients, the firm would buy them clothes and food and pay for their travel anywhere in the U.S. to be reunited with family members. “Those moments are etched in the minds and hearts of all of us who were there,” said Laura Tuell, who oversees pro bono projects at Jones Day. “Each of us who were fortunate enough to have the privilege of representing these clients are unbelievably proud to be a part of the firm that created and supported this extraordinary initiative.” One hardened litigator was so taken by the experience of working in Laredo that he cried as he described it to me.
But it was hard to miss the dissonance of a law firm simultaneously helping refugees and helping Trump. The migration crisis pre-dated Trump, but he exacerbated it through violent language and cruel policies. This directly undermined the lifesaving work that Jones Day lawyers had been performing in Laredo. And now, in the upper echelons of the Trump administration, it was former Jones Day lawyers who were getting up in court to defend the president’s actions.
For more than a few lawyers at the firm, it was heartbreaking. They were so proud of the Laredo Project, yet they felt that their firm—through its support for the Trump campaign and now their former colleagues’ work for the administration—was hacksawing what Jones Day stood for and had achieved on the Mexican border. Jones Day has a “split personality,” one lawyer in the D.C. office seethed to me. “We do good things [like Laredo] that are in direct opposition to the bad things we do.”
Some of the firm’s best-known lawyers began tiptoeing away from Trump. In a 2018 interview with a Plain Dealer columnist, Dick Pogue said, carefully, that while he supported many of the administration’s policies, “I worry about his commitment to the rule of law.”15 The columnist noted that, in private conversations, Pogue was considerably less charitable. Around this time, Kevyn Orr, the head of the Washington office and the firm’s most prominent Democrat, vented to numerous colleagues that he was deeply uncomfortable with the work Jones Day was doing for Trump.*
Even so, the firm trundled on. In 2018, Ginsberg met with a small group of Trump staffers. In the past, Republican and Democratic campaigns had used specially created companies to cover certain expenses, such as TV ads. Ginsberg now suggested to Brad Parscale, the 2020 campaign chief, that Jones Day arrange a supersized setup for Trump. The advantage was secrecy. Private companies don’t have to disclose their finances. If the Trump campaign routed its spending through this shell, which then doled out money for ads and whatever else it wanted, the flow of money would be largely invisible to the outside world.
Jared Kushner soon signed off on the plan, and Jones Day helped file the paperwork to incorporate American Made Media Consultants.16 Nearly $800 million of hard-to-track spending would soon gush through the company.17
Why did Brogan even want to be working with Trump? Sure, Brogan was a Republican, and the lower taxes and conservative judges that the administration was spawning must have appealed. So did the Justice Department’s full-throated backing for greater religious freedoms. (Jeff Sessions unveiled his “Place to Worship” initiative—in which the department would sue localities that blocked the construction or expansion of houses of worship—at an event at Jones Day’s D.C. offices.18)
But Brogan was supposed to be looking out for Jones Day. How did the Trump representation further the firm’s interests?
The money was, at most, part of the equation. Through the end of 2018, Jones Day had collected a total of $7.5 million from various Trump campaign committees, a sum that would continue growing over the next two years.19 That was a lot more than the firm had previously earned on federal campaigns—prior to the 2016 cycle, Jones Day hadn’t pocketed more than $1 million in a year20—but it still worked out to somewhere in the vicinity of one-tenth of 1 percent of the firm’s total revenue during that period.
Virtually every time the Trump campaign issued a quarterly financial statement, there would be news articles mentioning that Jones Day had received hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than any other law firm, and it created the vague impression that the firm was raking in megabucks. But to anyone who worked in the industry, the figures revealed the opposite. Jones Day was throwing many high-priced lawyers at this work, and they were each racking up hundreds of billable hours. In terms of the workload, this was the equivalent of a large corporate client, except that a large corporate client could easily generate tens of millions of dollars in annual billings.
Jones Day lawyers—conservatives and liberals alike—told me they puzzled over the relatively small payments disclosed in the Trump campaigns’ quarterly spending disclosures. Some became convinced that the firm was doing lots of this work basically for free. And for what? To sabotage their reputation? To scare away clients? “We were subsidizing Trump!” barked a partner who was close to Brogan. “I told everyone who would listen: ‘We are fools. We are taking partnership money and subsidizing him!’”*
What, then, was the draw? Some of Brogan’s confidants told me they suspected that the more criticism Jones Day got for its Trump work, the more Brogan wanted to keep doing it. There were few things he relished more than thumbing his nose—or his firm’s nose—at Beltway snobs. “He loves to give prissy establishmentarians a kick in the balls,” another longtime ally told me. (The irony was that the main focus of Brogan’s firm was assisting corporate America—the very establishment he claimed to detest.)
But maybe there was another rationale at play. Perhaps the proximity to Trump increased the odds that Jones Day and its clients would get their way with his administration. And whether by design or by luck, that is what sometimes ended up happening.