Ruth Marcus
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Ruth Marcus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hi, can I get a meeting to talk about this pending indictment? Hi, can I get a meeting to explain why you should approve my client's umpty ump billion dollar merger? Your clients are at risk of losing their government contracts. You can no longer have security clearances in cases where you need those in order to be able to represent your clients.
Oh, by the way, we won't hire lawyers for government jobs after that. And it's – many lawyers go to private firms and then want to go become prosecutors or something after that. So it's basically saying – Nice little law firm business you have there, $2.6 billion a year in the case of Paul Weiss. It'd be really a shame if all your clients left you and it crumbled before your eyes.
The fear was that clients would start running to the doors. And when you said, OK, fine, you'll lose some clients, but really seriously, can't you take a hit? You started to hear words like death spiral. And it is true that immediately after these orders are issued against law firms, other law firms were doing two things.
They were suggesting to the law firm's clients that, gee, it might be better off to have a firm that isn't on the government blacklist. And they were suggesting to some of the really highest paid and most highest billing partners at these law firms that, gee, it might be better for you if you weren't tied to this firm that's on the government blacklist.
So why don't you take your book of business and come to us?
Their rationale was that how can you live with yourself if you agree to settle something, settle a matter in which you have done absolutely nothing wrong? Take, for example, one of the charges in the indictment. It's not obviously a technical indictment.
of Wilmer Cutler and Pickering, which is one of the firms that got the executive order, was that it had the temerity not just to hire Bob Mueller in the first place, but to take him back after he served as special counsel investigating Russia and the first Trump administration. In election interference, yeah. And I think the law firms were unwilling to—
acknowledge blameworthiness when they weren't blameworthy. They were unwilling to pay the extortion price that Trump had set. And I think for some firms, they couldn't figure out the way into the to the administration to try to negotiate the same deal that firms like Paul Weiss and Skadden had.
I'm kind of 75-25 on this. Somebody asked me several weeks ago to go on a podcast to talk about a Trump third term, and I blew them off. I was like, that's ridiculous. It's not even a close question. And I think that was probably wrong on my part, because since then, the president has famously told us that he's not kidding. And the one thing that I have learned recently
is that when he says he wants to do something, you should not just dismiss it as idiot trolling by somebody who has never read the Constitution and doesn't respect it at all. He is going to try to push this in some way. And so I am way less dismissive of his craziness than I used to be.
I think he has found none of them are actually Roy Cohn, but in their totality, there are a lot of mini-Roys. He has excluded the people who will stand up to him. Think about people like... Bill Barr, even Jefferson Sessions, like the head of the Office of Legal Counsel.
Exactly. On top of that, in their place, has brought in the most pliable people that he can imagine. And I'm talking about that from Pam Bondi down.
We don't have to add it up.
Discuss. They used to give us take-home exams. I think the framers of the Constitution fully understood the... that arrangement. And whether it's a flaw or not, they understood that the judiciary was, in fact, the least dangerous branch.
But it did have the power, as Justice Marshall told us in Marbury v. Madison, of being able to declare what the law is, and at least until recently, of having a public that was going to be behind it in terms of respecting the court when it issued orders. So I don't think it's a constitutional design flaw. I think as with so many things, Trump just puts the Constitution to a stress test.
And, you know, some of us have failed our stress tests in the past.
All right. That was fun. It's scary, especially on the take-home exam.
Yeah, I guess it is.
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