Prominent attorneys are concerned the president is undermining his own administration’s case for preserving his controversial travel ban policy.
Prominent Republican attorneys are staging what amounts to an unprecedented public intervention against President Donald Trump, warning that his tweeting habit was doing serious harm to his bid to preserve his travel ban policy at the Supreme Court—and could be inflicting more widespread damage on his administration’s ability to carry out his agenda.
The outpouring of criticism was triggered by a flurry of tweets Trump sent Monday, attacking the Justice Department’s legal strategy, dismissing his own revised travel ban order as a “watered down, politically correct” version of what he originally set out to do, and blasting as “political” the court rulings against him on the subject.
The most attention-grabbing pushback came from George Conway, who was under consideration until recently for a top post overseeing Justice Department civil litigation in the Trump administration. Conway, who is married to top White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, even seemed to mock one of Trump’s favorite Twitter formulations.
“These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help OSG [Justice’s Office of Solicitor General] get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad,” Conway wrote.
Conway later clarified that he remains a Trump backer, but is not backing down from his criticism. In fact, he insisted that lawyers currently in the administration concur.
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A top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, Jack Goldsmith, unleashed a 17-entry Tweetstorm arguing that Trump’s ongoing attacks on his own lawyers and his apparent effort to disclaim responsibility for reissuing his “watered down” order are further eroding judicial deference for the executive branch.
“Given POTUS’s instability, it is not just courts that have reason to relax the presumption of regularity for this Prez,” wrote Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School. “We all have reason to do so about everything the Executive branch does that touches, however lightly, the President….One thing DT behavior entails…is many losses in court and not just on the immigration EOs….Everything else Executive would normally win—reversing Clean Power Plan, terminating treaty, new regs, etc.—will be much, much harder.”
Lawyers challenging Trump’s travel ban in court seemed gleeful at the utterances from the chief executive.
“Its kind of odd to have the defendant in Hawaii v Trump acting as our co-counsel. We don’t need the help but will take it,” wrote Neal Katyal, a lawyer behind the state of Hawaii-led case that resulted in the broadest injunction against Trump’s revised travel ban.
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.@realDonaldTrump's tweets prompt backlash from GOP lawyers https://t.co/xG8A0r5qBR pic.twitter.com/GxLhM1ROmY
— POLITICO (@politico) June 6, 2017
Very surprised to hear Conway’s husband say what he did. But it is true. He was smart to turn down the job that was offered to him by Trump as well. His wife already discredited herself and ruined her future prospects. Someone in the family has to be able to earn an income after the Trumpcapades.
Trump has surrounded himself with yes men and women. If even the most competent person on his staff gave him good advice, Trump will not follow it. He will just do whatever he wants and it’s up to those yes men and women to fix the fallout. Why does he even bother having advisers if he won’t listen to their advice?
Every time one of his employees quits or considers quitting, I say, good for him or her. They have to get out before their careers and reputations end up in the toilet and their mental health deteriorates completely. Trump destroys everyone and everything in his path. Hate to say this, but I’m praying that one day, he will get his comeuppance.
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