Law firm targeted by 'unconstitutional' executive order says Trump admin has failed to comply
Source: Law & Crime
Jun 10th, 2025, 1:31 pm
A law firm targeted by President Donald Trump wants a federal judge to expand the reach of an injunction issued against an executive order previously found to be “null and void” for violating the Constitution. On March 27, the 45th and 47th president signed an Executive Order entitled “Addressing Risks from WilmerHale” which — like many similar such orders — accused the Los Angeles-based law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, popularly stylized as WilmerHale, of “conduct detrimental to critical American interests” and which aimed to cut its employees out of the federal government.
On March 28, WilmerHale filed a 64-page complaint in Washington, D.C., asking the court to enjoin Trump’s executive order as “unconstitutional.” The government, in turn, moved to dismiss the lawsuit entirely, turning the dispute into a battle over motions for summary judgment. On May 27, Senior U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, issued an emphatic ruling for the plaintiffs in the form of a 73-page memorandum opinion featuring no fewer than 27 exclamation points — used to express disdain for what the court views as the severity of the constitutional violations in Trump’s order.
“I have concluded that this Order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional,” Leon wrote. “Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!” Still, despite the volubly chiding nature of Leon’s order, the Trump administration is allegedly declining to distribute the ruling to all of the agencies plausibly subject to the original executive order. Now, in a six-page motion to amend the judgment, the law firm says its lawsuit was fashioned in such a way so as to explicitly encompass the entire federal government.
“WilmerHale’s complaint named 52 defendants: 26 federal government agencies, 25 federal officers (sued in their official capacities), and the United States,” the filing reads. “The complaint explained that the United States was named ‘to ensure that the relief ordered by the Court will apply government-wide.’ Such comprehensive relief was necessary both because ‘WilmerHale’s employees interact with — and their attorneys appear before — dozens of different federal agencies’ and because Executive Order 14250 ‘generally directs all federal agencies to take specified action.'”In the motion, the law firm says it tried to get the government to notify all the “covered agencies” of the judgment in Leon’s order. The government, in turn, would not agree to do so.
Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/binds-the-entire-government-law-firm-targeted-by-unconstitutional-executive-order-says-trump-admin-has-failed-to-comply-with-courts-null-and-void-ruling/
Full headline: ‘Binds the entire government’: Law firm targeted by ‘unconstitutional’ executive order says Trump admin has failed to comply with court’s ‘null and void’ ruling
Link to MOTION (PDF viewer) - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25969760-wilmerhale-amend/
Link to MOTION (PDF) - https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25969760/wilmerhale-amend.pdf