Make This Obstruction Thing Go Away

[babylonsister]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/06/trump_treats_lawyers_as_hired_help_will_that_work_now_that_he_s_president.html

June 22 2017 5:54 AM
Make This Obstruction Thing Go Away
Trump has always treated lawyers like hired help. As president, he’s finally found attorneys who refuse to do his bidding.
By Dahlia Lithwick


It will shock nobody to learn that Donald Trump doesn’t understand what lawyers do. If you are a “successful businessman,” it’s hardly surprising that you would conceive of lawyers as well-compensated plumbers and cocktail waitresses—folks who make crap disappear and bring you everything you want, wordlessly and with short skirts. If you are a Trump-style “successful businessman,” one who is apt to hinge his success on infinite lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and the invitation to your creditors to file other lawsuits, your lawyers are pretty much just the guys and gals who empty your ashtrays of whatever debris is left behind once the court has ruled. If one lawyer won’t get you the outcome you desire, the next one surely will. With massive fees and important connections on offer, there will always be a nearly infinite pool of people willing to file some brief on your behalf.

As soon as Trump started to talk about lawyers and the law on the campaign trail last year, I recognized the type: a rich guy who had never been told “no.” If you have small children you, too, will recognize the type. It’s a developmental stage that usually ends at toddlerhood, but if the toddler has enough money, power, and influence, that person can grow up to be an adult who is a nightmare to represent. Before I was a journalist I briefly worked at a family law firm, and I occasionally had the professional obligation to assist extremely wealthy “successful businessmen” with their divorces and custody battles. Sometimes these folks were on the other side. Always, they held a view of lawyers I didn’t remember learning about in law school: They believed attorneys were the help and that laws were problems that—with enough help and enough money to buy even better help—could be made to go away.

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I suspect that if one asked Trump if there was any difference between the Office of Legal Counsel, the White House Counsel’s office, the attorney general, his divorce attorney, and the FBI director, he would say, without guile or uncertainty, that they all work for him. Perhaps the unitary executive crowd would agree. But as we inch nearer to a showdown between Mueller’s and the president’s views of what lawyers do each day, it’s worth considering that there is one place left in America in which lawyers in crumpled shirts work for a tiny fraction of what their law school classmates earn. In Washington, the “successful businessmen” may buy a lot of $100 signature cocktails at the Trump International Hotel bar, but lifelong government lawyers don’t usually empty ashtrays for anyone.

Trump’s robber baron view of all attorneys as fungible well-paid loyalists may someday prove to be the Washington way. But so long as the rumpled, badly paid government lawyers are sitting on the other side of the table, this won’t be as simple as a divorce settlement. And Trump still has to contend with the most rumpled and principled government lawyers of them all: the judges who haven’t been much impressed, at least thus far, with all the president’s men.

[Gothmog]

1. Trump has a lousy legal team