As the Trump administration came to an ignominious end—democracy in doubt, cherished institutions trampled, violence in the streets—its alumni scurried toward the friendly confines of Jones Day’s landmark building. A quarter of a mile away, a statue of “Freedom” was perched atop the Capitol dome, and the bronze female figure was visible from the steps leading up to the law firm’s heavy front doors. On January 6, months of fearmongering and lies about voter fraud and a stolen election exploded into a deadly insurrection. Jones Day wasn’t to blame, but it wasn’t not to blame either. The firm had contributed to misapprehensions about the vulnerability of the electoral system. More important, it had nurtured, protected, and enabled Donald Trump since long before anyone took his candidacy seriously and for long after his demagogy was impossible to miss. Now the costs were clear.
The day after the riot, Eric Dreiband announced his resignation from the Justice Department; he would rejoin Jones Day the next month.* It was an interesting juxtaposition: As a lawyer in public service, Dreiband was perfectly willing to call it quits as his “client” (the president) pushed the bounds of propriety, even as his once-and-future employer in the private sector insisted on maintaining loyalty, no matter what.
In March, David Morrell returned to Jones Day, which promoted him to partner; in the Justice Department, in addition to his work on the Walmart case, he’d defended federal agents’ detention of rioters in Portland.1 That month, Scott Brady—whose efforts as U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh to investigate Hunter Biden had raised concerns inside the Justice Department that he was trying to hurt Joe Biden’s candidacy*2—also came back to Jones Day, where he’d worked a few jobs earlier. In his new job, he’d focus in part on defending companies that were targets of federal investigations.3
In April, Brinton Lucas, who also worked in the Justice Department, returned to the firm. (“Brinton will add great value to the representation of our clients in the highest courts,” Noel Francisco predicted.4) In May, Kate O’Scannlain, the top lawyer in Trump’s Labor Department, signed on. And in June, Hashim Mooppan returned after four years at the Justice Department. (He had defended Trump’s ban on travelers from Muslim countries.5)
Finally, in September 2021, James Burnham came full circle. He had been an associate when he left with what amounted to an extra year’s salary in his pocket. Now, following stints in the White House and Justice Department (where he’d sat in on the Walmart meetings) and a Supreme Court clerkship for Neil Gorsuch, he was hired back by Francisco—as a partner.6
A couple of week later, Francisco told me that he thought Jones Day’s exertions for Trump were going to pay dividends. “I believe the firm’s work in this area has afforded incredible professional opportunities for many of our lawyers, and that those opportunities will redound to the firm’s long-term benefit as many of those lawyers return to the firm.”
In the spring of 2021, Johnson & Johnson turned to Jones Day for help.7 Thousands of people were claiming to have contracted cancer via regular use of J&J’s talcum baby powder, which for years had been marketed as a feminine hygiene product. While J&J denied that the powder contained carcinogens or caused cancer, this was threatening to become a very costly problem for America’s largest health care company. Jones Day, of course, had a well-thumbed playbook for such situations: Blur the science, blame the victims, question the consequences. But there was another reason J&J had turned to its longtime law firm: Jones Day had pioneered the use of a brutally effective legal maneuver to help companies shed their liabilities as easily as a dirty pair of pants.
The tactic was known as the Texas two-step. It worked like this: A company facing a ruinous wave of lawsuits registers as a Texas corporation and then splits itself into two separate entities. One contains the ongoing operating business. The other houses the original company’s legal liabilities—the costs arising from litigation, government investigations, and the like. Then that second entity files for bankruptcy, leaving plaintiffs, the government, and anyone else with a legal claim to fight for financial scraps.
By the time Jones Day pitched this strategy to J&J, the firm had already executed it with great results on behalf of other companies, including one owned by Koch Industries.8 It couldn’t have been a hard sell for J&J, eager to insulate itself from a flood of lawsuits. Under tight secrecy, work began on what the lawyers codenamed Project Plato.9
In October 2021, J&J spun off a newly created subsidiary called LTL Management, which immediately filed for bankruptcy. J&J infused LTL with more than $2 billion to handle payouts to thousands of cancer victims, which the company described as a magnanimous effort to “equitably resolve” current and future lawsuits.10 But the money seemed grossly inadequate considering that a court had recently ordered J&J to pay more than $2 billion to a group of only twenty-two women with ovarian cancer. (Five days after the LTL spinoff and bankruptcy filing, J&J announced that it had earned about $4 billion in profits in the prior three months.)
This was bad news for cancer patients but a proud moment for Jones Day, which was pulling in millions for its work on the spinoff and bankruptcy. (Partners were billing as much as $1,450 an hour.) The Financial Times noted that Jones Day was reaping a “fee bonanza” by helping J&J and other companies dance the Texas two-step.11
Jones Day’s role attracted criticism—not just from plaintiffs’ lawyers and activists, who argued that the two-step was a flagrant abuse of the bankruptcy system, but also from the Biden administration. The U.S. Trustee, an arm of the Justice Department, objected to Jones Day representing LTL, on the grounds that the law firm was a years-long adviser to J&J, an apparent conflict of interest. Legal scholars also cried foul. “For Jones Day,” one professor asked, “the question is: What is the boundary of zealous representation?”12
In fact, it was hard to detect any boundary whatsoever. In early 2022, reporters at Reuters were preparing an article critical of J&J’s efforts to limit payments to cancer patients. Jones Day asked a federal judge to issue an injunction blocking the news agency from publishing its article. Reuters rushed out its exposé the next day, rendering moot the requested injunction. Even so, Jones Day’s attempt to take a hammer to the First Amendment—which courts have long interpreted as prohibiting such prior restraint of published speech—seemed to reflect the law firm’s increasing radicalization.
There were plenty of other signs as well. In 2021, Jones Day filed a lawsuit arguing that the setup of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Dana Baiocco remained a commissioner, was unconstitutional—and that the agency’s actions were therefore legally void.13 The firm successfully sued on behalf of two Realtors’ associations to block the Biden administration’s moratorium on evictions during the pandemic.
Not long after, McGahn and Francisco submitted a Supreme Court brief on behalf of Mitch McConnell. The “friend of the court” filing was related to a lawsuit by Ted Cruz, who was seeking to invalidate an obscure provision of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law. What made the Jones Day brief notable was its ambitious embrace of judicial activism. McGahn and Francisco argued that the Supreme Court should strike down the entirety of the 2003 law, not just the one provision at issue in Cruz’s lawsuit. Their claim was that because other parts of the statute had already been invalidated, the remainder was “a patchwork of provisions that Congress never would have approved.” This was a weak argument—the original law stipulated that even if certain elements were deemed unconstitutional, the rest should remain intact—but here was Jones Day, again, trying to advance a tenuous position that happened to align with its leaders’ ideology. As the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus put it, “There is, it seems, no argument too extreme for this crowd in their effort to reshape the law to their liking.”14
Jones Day, in short, was not chastened and was not backing down. This was a pattern, and it should not have surprised anyone. Jones Day was a corporate law firm, and a little public outrage wasn’t going to fundamentally alter its character. It was going to remain devoted to its causes and clients, the same way that Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps and Gibson Dunn and Baker McKenzie and all the other megafirms would remain devoted to theirs, regardless of how far they had strayed from their original missions or their profession’s sacred creeds. These firms were rich, their top partners pocketing many millions a year. They were strong, teeming with thousands of lawyers in dozens of offices. And nobody had the power to stop them—least of all anyone with a compelling interest to do so.
And yet some of Jones Day’s left-leaning lawyers had drawn solace from the firm’s occasional liberal overtures. In Minneapolis, for example, where the partner in charge of the office was a former Obama administration official, Jones Day had launched a pro bono project to help the city government deal with the problems of police violence against Black residents. While the firm largely kept quiet about its work on the conservative front, it was quick to crow about this one. In the fall of 2021, Jones Day created a colorful eight-page brochure titled “Do You Know Us? Jones Day and Our Pro Bono Culture.” It highlighted work like the Laredo Project (since renamed The Border Project) and the policing initiative in Minneapolis. “The Firm’s Managing Partner initiated the effort to demonstrate Jones Day’s commitment ‘to advancing the rule of law governing policing in the minority communities,’” the brochure stated.
In September 2021, the Jones Day partner in charge of pro bono work sent me the brochure. That same week, another partner told me a story that highlighted the conflict that was continuing to simmer inside the firm. Two decades earlier, Jones Day had stopped working for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence after the firm took on the firearms manufacturer Colt. In the ensuing years, Jones Day’s liberal lawyers had managed to resume doing some pro bono work for gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety. This was feasible only because Jones Day, for whatever reason, had stopped working for gun companies. The liberals convinced themselves that this was a sign that their firm, despite its conservative reputation, was really willing to take on both sides, left and right. Some even believed that Jones Day’s leadership had taken a principled stand against representing gun companies (following the lead of other major law firms).
Then, in August 2021, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit in federal court against the world’s leading gun companies: Colt, Smith & Wesson, Glock, Sturm Ruger. The suit accused the companies of illegally trafficking “a torrent of guns” to Mexican drug cartels. A month later, a handful of law firms announced they were lining up to defend the gun companies. Most of the firms were small or midsized, with one exception: Jones Day was defending Smith & Wesson. And it wasn’t just anyone at Jones Day. It was Noel Francisco, whom Brogan, the day after Biden’s inauguration, had promoted to run the firm’s Washington office. (He replaced Kevyn Orr, who was given the new job of partner in charge of U.S. offices.) In defending Smith & Wesson, Francisco was teaming up with a former federal prosecutor, Andrew Lelling, whom the firm had hired in early 2021 from the Trump administration.
The partner who brought this to my attention guessed that Jones Day would, once again, have to halt its gun-control work. “It’s so disappointing,” he told me.
After Trump lost the election, his campaign was converted into political action committees. It was the outcome that Ginsberg and McGahn had expected back in 2015 when they began representing the Trump campaign and figured it would quickly fizzle out. Their hope at the time was that once Trump realized he had no shot of winning a Republican primary, much less capturing the nomination, much less prevailing in a national election, and settled instead on creating an influence-buying PAC, Jones Day would get the job of setting up the entity and making sure it complied with the relevant regulations. More than five years later, the PACs were all that was left, and Jones Day was their law firm.
In the 2012 election cycle, before Jones Day hired the Patton Boggs crew, the firm had pocketed a grand total of $169,541 working on federal campaigns. Eight years later, the windfall was well over $19 million.15 Some of that (about $6 million) came from the Trump campaign, but the remainder was spread across a wide variety of Republican candidates and committees, ranging from the RNC (almost $5 million) to a Republican congressman’s Warrior Diplomat PAC ($450).
In the 2022 election cycle, with democracy on the ballot as much as any candidate, the gusher continued. Trump’s shadow loomed large, and his PACs and affiliated groups were still creating lots of work for Jones Day (and were still spewing lots of lies about the election16). And so were other Republicans, including the RNC and the Republican Senate fundraising committee and Senator Ron Johnson, a prolific peddler of misinformation about the 2020 election,17 and Trump wannabes in Pennsylvania18 and Alabama.19 Jones Day was in their corner, and it was good at its job, and it wasn’t going to stop.
Steve Brogan and his colleagues had wagered that representing Trump—and staffing his administration—would help transform Jones Day into a go-to firm for Republicans, mainstream and fringe alike. Their bet was paying off.
The black leather cover was cracked and discolored with age. Lissy Gulick sat at a table in her home,20 a converted gray farmhouse built in the mid-1800s, several miles outside Cleveland. She inspected the seventy-two-year-old volume, oversized and heavy like a photo album. Gulick hadn’t looked at it—hell, she hadn’t even thought about it—in what felt like decades. But she had spare time these days, thanks to the pandemic and her recent retirement as an actress. (She’d had small roles in a bunch of films, including as a social worker in Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher.) There were only two and a half words on the book’s dimpled cover, and they were etched in tiny golden calligraphy: Thomas H. Jones.
Gulick knew her grandfather as Tom Tom. Though he had died when Gulick was only four, she felt close to the great man, her memories kept alight by family lore and evocative photos.
Here he was sailing, the strong Lake Erie wind tilting his boat far to the port side. Once, Gulick had dropped a favorite toy overboard, and Tom Tom had calculated wind and drift and navigated the craft to fetch the special piece of rubber bobbing in the choppy lake.
Here he was on a sunny day, outside their home, wearing a brown flannel suit, deep creases lining his face, beaming at his granddaughter in his arms. More than seven decades later, Gulick could still feel the warmth kindled by Tom Tom’s “wonderful smile-wrinkles.”
She opened the book. Inside was a collection of letters, proclamations, and newspaper clippings commemorating the role her grandfather had played at the small law firm21 that he had joined straight out of Ohio State in 1911—and that, more than a century later, still bore his surname. Tom Jones had been in the prime of his career when a heart attack killed him at age sixty. The resolutions adopted by the boards of directors of the numerous companies he advised—reproduced in the book with their ornate lettering and the curling signatures of the companies’ board members—were testament to that. “He was naturally modest and unassuming and so won and held the affection and friendship of his acquaintances and associates,” read one proclamation, issued by the board of the Warner & Swasey Company, a local machine-making concern. “We shall sadly miss his wise counsel, but even more we shall miss him as a friend.”
The book brimmed with similar testimonials, and Gulick skimmed them and smiled as she leafed through the still-glossy pages. It was a cold day in November 2020. Two weeks earlier, Trump had lost the election—and that was why Gulick had rummaged around in her house to retrieve the nearly forgotten memorial book.
For Gulick, Jones Day had long been a family affair. In addition to Tom Tom, Gulick’s father had been a partner. So had her other grandfather and his son, Gulick’s uncle. In the 1940s and ’50s, she had tagged along with her father to the office on Saturday mornings and sat at the phone operator’s desk, playing with the manual switchboard. When she was an adult, the firm had been the place that she could count on to perform mundane tasks like tidying up this relative’s will or that one’s mortgage. “We just thought that Jones Day was the last word,” she reminisced.
Gulick wasn’t naive. She had known for some time that this was no longer Tom Tom’s firm, that the world had changed irrevocably since the days when her grandfather’s colleagues counseled the East Ohio Gas Company to promptly make whole those harmed by its deadly explosions. By the late 1970s—around the time that the firm’s leaders had set their sights on conquering first the country, then the world—Gulick’s phone calls had stopped getting returned. “It had gone from the place where my granddad could suggest a nice young lawyer to a place that seemed unapproachable,” she said.
And then, as the 2020 election came and went, Gulick learned that this once-familiar law firm was working for the president and his allies, who seemed to be playing Russian roulette with American democracy. “I am just so outraged that a company with my grandfather’s name on the door would act in this way,” she told me. She flipped through the memorial book, and she considered what his law firm had become, and she fumed.
“Tom Tom would have probably said they got too big for their britches. It’s one thing representing a client. But it’s another . . .” She trailed off, too angry to complete her sentence.