President Donald Trump’s strike this week against a Democratic-linked law firm came years after it faced allegations of aiding unethical and, in some cases, illegal efforts to weaponize the Justice Department against Trump.
Trump’s order, which stripped Perkins Coie of its staff’s security clearances and demanded an end to any federal contracts it has with the government, quickly drew claims from critics that the president was exacting political retribution against an opponent.
But Perkins Coie’s role in allegedly unlawful activity during Trump’s first term complicates the characterization of Trump’s move as an act of simple partisan revenge.
Russian collusion connection
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee retained Perkins Coie and Marc Elias, then one of the firm’s top lawyers, in the spring of 2016. Shortly afterward, in April 2016, Elias hired an opposition research firm named Fusion GPS to dig into whether Trump, Clinton’s opponent in the presidential race, had ties to Russia.
Fusion GPS, in turn, hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who went on to compile the now-discredited set of allegations known as the Steele dossier.
The work facilitated by Perkins Coie led to a sprawling criminal investigation that paralyzed the first Trump administration without ever uncovering the Russian collusion plot alleged by Perkins Coie’s clients.
The arrangement between Perkins Coie and the Democrats initially obscured Clinton’s role in pushing unverified claims about Trump to the FBI and intelligence community. Media outlets reported on the collusion allegations without noting their partisan origins, giving the claims more weight.
A subsequent special counsel investigation of how the Russia investigation unfolded found evidence that, in July 2016, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server,” which, at the time, was a scandal dogging her campaign.
John Durham, the special counsel tasked with investigating the Russia saga, alleged wrongdoing by Perkins Coie when it presented the Steele dossier claims against Trump to the FBI while concealing the fact that Trump’s political opponent had purchased the dossier as a way to get ahead in the presidential race.
Russiagate’s wide-ranging fallout
A top lawyer for Perkins Coie at the time faced a criminal indictment over his role in funneling the Russia allegations to the FBI in 2016.
Michael Sussmann was ultimately acquitted after a 2022 trial in Washington of one charge of lying to the FBI.
But Durham had accused Sussmann of peddling false information to the FBI and media, leading to damaging headlines about Trump in the final stretch of the 2016 race.
Sussmann was accused of telling then-FBI General Counsel James Baker “by text message and in person that he was acting on his own and was not representing any client or company in providing the information to the FBI” in September 2016.
“Our investigation showed that, in point of fact, these representations to Baker were false in that Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign (as evidenced by, among other things, his law firm’s billing records and internal communications),” Durham concluded in his 2023 report.
At the time, Sussmann was allegedly working to push false claims of a secret communications channel between Trump’s business empire and a Russian bank. Durham found that Sussmann, Elias, and Fusion GPS met in Perkins Coie’s offices to work on the plan to create the secret Russian server claims and encourage the FBI to investigate them. Then, the Perkins Coie attorney succeeded in planting news stories about the FBI investigation he intentionally triggered.
Sussmann was not the only person involved in starting the Trump-Russia investigation who faced a criminal indictment. Kevin Clinesmith, a lawyer at the time for the FBI, pleaded guilty in 2020 to doctoring an email in an effort to renew a surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
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Clinesmith deleted language from the email that confirmed Page previously worked with the CIA, instead inserting an assertion that Page had never done so. If the FBI had disclosed Page’s relationship with the CIA, the Justice Department would have discovered that Page had already shared with intelligence agents the details of the Russian connections that the FBI was criminally investigating.
In addition to Durham, the Justice Department inspector general found in a 2019 report problems with the way agents conducted the Russia investigation that Perkins Coie helped start.
The law firm’s arrangement with the Clinton campaign caught the attention of election officials as well.
The Federal Election Commission fined Clinton’s campaign and the DNC in 2022 after a yearslong investigation led the FEC to conclude both had violated campaign finance laws.
FEC officials said the campaign and the DNC unlawfully listed the purpose of payments to Perkins Coie as “legal services” when, in fact, the money went to anti-Trump opposition research.
Trump has made addressing what he has described as corruption within the FBI and Justice Department a top priority of his second presidency. Ending the federal government’s contracting relationship with a law firm accused by prosecutors of contributing to that corruption could be viewed as part of the effort.
Close FBI ties
Perkins Coie’s relationship with the FBI has come under scrutiny from congressional Republicans previously.
In 2022, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) sent a letter to the FBI demanding more information about a “Secure Work Environment” that the FBI was operating out of the Washington offices of Perkins Coie.
The FBI had set up the office space nine years prior, and the lawmakers said they learned that Perkins Coie was given the authority to maintain the workspace.
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Sussmann, the Perkins Coie lawyer who fed Clinton-backed Russia allegations to the FBI, had badge access to both the workspace and FBI headquarters, the lawmakers said.
Before Trump’s 2024 election victory and Kash Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI, the bureau director wrote in his book, Government Gangsters, that he views Perkins Coie as a member of the “Executive Branch Deep State.”