Welcome to Thursday’s edition of Washington Secrets. Today we look at how the law firm Jones Day, which staffed up the first Trump administration and represented the president and his campaign in a string of lawsuits, has switched sides and the ethical questions that raises. We also dive into the court documents where we find a riff on Trump’s cheeky sign-off phrase, and we get a far-from-straight answer on who came up with the idea for the breakout moment in the State of the Union. …
Noel Francisco came to national prominence as Donald Trump’s first-term solicitor general.
He developed a reputation as a battler for difficult causes. Against all odds, he managed to defend the so-called “Muslim ban” at the Supreme Court.
No wonder he is in demand since becoming a partner at Jones Day.
Court filings obtained by Secrets show that he is one of the lawyers defending JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon, its chief executive, against accusations that it “debanked” a client for his political beliefs.
That client is his former boss.
Francisco may once have been the fourth-highest ranking lawyer in the Trump administration but now he is the latest figure to have switched sides. Along with his firm, which earned millions of dollars from the 2016 Trump campaign, he provided dozens of lawyers for the administration, which took his side as the then-president fought to overturn the 2020 election.
“There is no other legal firm more clearly aligned with Trump personally and the wider MAGA movement in general,” said a Secrets legal source. “They revel in it.”
Trump’s allies are fuming. They accuse Jones Day of a conflict of interest and claim that lawyers such as Francisco have intimate insider knowledge of the Trump legal playbook, which they say should be kept far from the case.
“Isn’t there a conflict of interest given that the President has been represented by Jones Day??” posted Laura Loomer, the rightwing influencer, who was the first to ask the question.
“Even the American Bar Association (which has become a totally woke DEI activist group) is clear that prior representation of a client can create a conflict of interest if another client is retained to sue that former client,” Loomer posted.
The row comes from one of the mega-bucks Trump lawsuits that he has launched while flexing his legal muscles. He says JPMorgan acted unfairly by closing his accounts.
JAMIE DIMON MAY BE THE DEFENDANT IN TRUMP’S LAWSUIT, BUT JPMORGAN CHASE ISN’T THE ACTUAL TARGET
And last week he won a victory. JPMorgan admitted in court documents for the first time that it closed some 50 accounts associated with Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, although it offered no reason.
Trump is suing the bank and its CEO for $5 billion.
But it is the names of the lawyers in the court filings that have particularly rankled in Trumpworld, where loyalty is everything.
Other filings last week spotlighted Francisco as one of the lawyers on the case. The name of another key player will also ring bells with longtime Trump watchers: Eliot Pedrosa was plucked from Jones Day in 2018 for a top role with the Inter-American Development Bank, pushing the administration’s hard-line anti-socialist policy in the region.
Now he is back with the firm and working against his former boss.
Jones Day inserted itself deeply into the first Trump administration, providing a string of key staff for the White House and Justice Department, and then representing the Trump campaign in suits around the 2020 election.
When Trump campaigned in 2016, he took on a Jones Day Partner, Don McGahn, as his outside counsel. McGahn would later become his White House counsel, before returning to Jones Day.
The Trump campaign paid Jones Day hundreds of thousands of dollars for representing it during the Russia investigations.
Mike Davis, a former legal adviser to Trump, said he was shocked that it had taken a case against Trump.
“The law firm Jones Day, which represented Trump, is now adverse to him in the JPMorgan debanking lawsuit, he told Steve Bannon’s War Room. “They know his mindset, strengths, weaknesses, negotiation limits, and confidential information. Taking an adverse client puts them on very treacherous ethical ground.”
ABA has rules on this sort of thing.
“A lawyer who has formerly represented a client in a matter shall not thereafter represent another person in the same or a substantially related matter in which that person’s interests are materially adverse to the interests of the former client unless the former client gives informed consent, confirmed in writing,” it states in rule 1.9.
That still allows sufficient room for Jones Day to represent JP Morgan, said Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, unless the firm had previously worked on a matter closely related to this case.
Nor was it enough to say that the firm or figures such as Francisco had insider understanding of the Trump legal strategy in order to get them thrown off the case.
“That would be called the playbook strategy in legal ethics terms, that somebody represented a party long enough to know their entire legal playbook, which then would be potentially disadvantageous,” she said.
“That was kind of a popular theory of conflicts, maybe 20 or 30 years ago,” Robertson said. “At this point, most courts have said that the idea of a playbook conflict is not enough.”
Jones Day and Trump’s outside counsel did not respond to requests for comment.
Thank you for your attention to this matter
Court filings are always filled with interesting nuggets. And the ones in this case are no different.
Secrets is particularly taken with the included termination letters, sent from JP Morgan to Trump and his businesses, with the subject line: “IMPORTANT: Closing Our Banking Relationship.”
More interesting, however, is the sign-off. This letter to the Trump Corporation ends: “Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.”
Of course, it is a standard closing line. But could this unceremonious end to Trump’s banking relationships have triggered an upsurge in the president’s own use of a version of this phrase in his social media postings?
The president of good ideas?
The president’s strategy of weaponizing the State of the Union by asking members of Congress to stand in a show of support for different principles and people will provide fodder for attack ads for months to come.
But whose idea was it?
White House officials are notorious for claiming that any successful gambit was all Trump’s own idea. Even so, Secrets called up a senior administration official to try to find out where the line came from.
The official did not disappoint.
“The president invented standing up and sitting down,” came the deadpan response.
Lunchtime reading
The sickest burns on the internet right now are coming from French bureaucrats: “A cadre of bureaucrats in Paris’s gilded Quai d’Orsay are ditching their carefully worded communiqués in favor of a stream of real-time X posts that mix self-mockery and sarcasm … in English. Their X account is called French Response, and it was started in September as part of a broader French strategy to adopt a more combative tone. The goal: better defend the country in a multifront meme war.”
Thomas Massie is testing whether a Trump nemesis can win a Republican primary: It’s a pick-a-side moment for voters, and a test of whether Trump maintains his iron grip on the party.
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