Mark Zuckerberg’s Former AI Lawyer for Meta Is Now Taking on Elon Musk, DOGE, and Trump
And we’ve seen other examples. They sent to the White House a list of all of the CIA agents hired in the last two years with a list of their names in an unsecured format. There’s real problems. Beyond that, the use that’s being made of this information is to do things that are themselves illegal. So fire everybody who has probationary attached to their name, even if it turns out they have civil service protection; “You must respond to us with a weekly list of five things or you’ll be fired.” They’re using this information to facilitate all of the other things DOGE is doing to try to dismantle the federal government.
Were you disappointed that Paul Weiss agreed to Trump’s terms? What should the firm have done instead?
Paul Weiss, and then Skadden more recently. It’s really worrisome because it’s so clearly unconstitutional what Trump is doing. All three of the firms that have fought back have quickly won court orders. But I think what we see with Paul Weiss and Skadden is the fear and intimidation actually taking effect. They worry that even though they’re legally right, and even though they could get a court order, if Trump decides to beat up on them, that’s going to harm them. So they sort of cave in and agree to give him free legal support and free legal resources. That’s a bit of a microcosm of what we’re seeing more broadly.
The way democracies turn authoritarian is if you can intimidate people into not speaking out because they don’t want to be the ones targeted, then everyone looks around, and they don’t see anyone else sticking their head up, and so they decide to keep their heads down, too. We’ve seen that phenomenon a little bit with the big law firms. I mean, some of them, to their credit, have represented these firms that have stood up, but a lot of them have decided they want to keep their heads down.
We’re seeing that phenomenon with universities, as he’s targeting first Columbia and then Penn and now Harvard. A number of universities, including my own [Stanford did not respond to a request for comment], are not standing up and saying, Hey, this is unacceptable.
Which corporations, in the spirit of big law, are handling the incoming in the correct way?
The obvious effort is to intimidate the firms by saying, “We’re not going to do business with any companies that hire these law firms.” I’ve seen a number of general counsel folks say, “Hey, we want to hire people who actually will stand up for themselves, not people that will run and hide at the first line of trouble.” That’s been encouraging.
Are there particular ones you would point to?
I don’t know that this represents standing up or not, and it’s a little bit surprising, but I did note that Amazon hired Perkins Coie for a new patent case just recently. I would not have put Amazon in the sort of resistance category, and so it may be that it’s a big bureaucracy and they did what they want, or it may be that there are lawyers within Amazon who wanted to show their support for the firm.
