The Justice Department accidentally told a court last week that it was abandoning its effort to revive President Donald Trump’s executive orders against four prominent law firms, according to an administration official.
DOJ made an “inadvertent filing” on March 2 when it requested to dismiss its appeal of four court rulings striking down Trump’s orders, the official told Bloomberg Law. The administration was considering dropping the appeal but had not made a final decision about whether to file the request, according to the official.
Within 24 hours of filing the dismissal request, a DOJ lawyer scrapped the motion, a rare move that sparked confusion among the targeted firms. The department on March 6 followed up with a brief defending Trump’s orders, arguing that judges who blocked them interfered with the president’s authority to address national security and other threats.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that DOJ changed course after Trump railed against the move, expressing anger at department leadership for backing down.
Trump’s orders accused Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey of weaponizing the legal system and engaging in discrimination. The orders also cited the firms’ connections to lawyers and causes the president views as adverse to him.
The orders threatened to pull security clearances held by the firms’ lawyers and kill government contracts held by the firms and their clients, as well as block their lawyers from entering government buildings. The firms won injunctions against the orders from four separate judges, who ruled that the orders were unconstitutional.
Reached for comment, the White House said Wednesday the president remains resolute in his commitment to discourage bad actors in the legal industry.
“President Trump will not waver on his commitment to ensure that government funds and access are not used to promote, subsidize, or encourage the weaponization of the legal system or unlawful discrimination,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman.
The firms are scheduled to file briefs by March 27. The Justice Department will have until April 10 to reply.
‘Dog Ate My Homework’
Stephen Gillers, a New York University School of Law professor, doesn’t buy the mistaken filing explanation. The department likely sought to drop the appeal after determining it was going to lose in court, he said.
“It’s a dog-ate-my-homework excuse,” said Gillers.
Dropping an appeal is not taken lightly at the DOJ, according to former department lawyers.
The solicitor general is in charge of deciding whether to move forward with or drop an appeal, according Sasha Samberg-Champion, a former appellate lawyer in DOJ’s civil rights division. “What almost certainly happened,” Samberg-Champion said, was that Solicitor General John Sauer decided against pursuing the case, triggering the motion to dismiss.
“The process of deciding to go forward with an appeal is extremely deliberate and happens concurrently with drafting the brief,” Samberg-Champion said. “The DOJ has the responsibility to go forward with cases that have chances to succeed. If it’s going to be a political decision that gets made by non-lawyers, it’s going to hurt the DOJ’s credibility.”
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Abhishek Kambli, a deputy associate attorney general, are listed as the DOJ lawyers in the court filing requesting the appeal’s dismissal and the later motion to withdraw the request. The pair are also listed as the lawyers on the appellate brief filed late last week.
Woodward, the Justice Department’s third-in-command, previously represented FBI Director Kash Patel, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, and people charged for their alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 US Capitol attack. Kambli, who signed the court filings, is the former deputy attorney general for Kansas.
DOJ said in its court filing seeking to drop the appeal that it had notified the four law firms, who had consented to the motion. That makes it unlikely that the request was filed inadvertently, according to a former DOJ lawyer, who commented for the story on the condition of anonymity.
Rebecca Roiphe, an ex-prosecutor in Manhattan, said she was surprised DOJ appealed the decisions in the first place. Other elite law firms by that point had made deals with the White House, pledging $940 million in free legal services to steer clear of punitive actions.
“The president got what he wanted,” said Roiphe, now a law professor at New York Law School. “Elite law firms have more or less come in line.”
Once the Trump administration moved forward with the appeal, backing off “does look like they don’t think there’s any legal merit” to the case, she said.
“There are probably lawyers in the department who have different views about the merits of this case, and they don’t want it to look like there was internal strife,” Roiphe said. “There are probably some in the department who look at this case and think it lacks merit and the administration wants to bury that idea.”
Gillers said the abrupt reversal last week speaks to Trump’s intolerance for admitting defeat
“Trump was the public face of the effort to go after the Big Law,” Gillers said. “He bragged about it multiple times. He took credit for beating up on Big Law and for ‘winning’ nearly $1 billion in free legal help. The brunt of the humiliation is his unless he can reverse the decision and persuade others that the decision was made without consulting him.”
The case is Jenner and Block v. DOJ, D.C. Cir., 25-5265, 3/6/26
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