The New Yorker:

The President has two goals: to seek revenge and to intimidate lawyers challenging his agenda. Is a top firm’s deal with him a necessary act of survival or a damaging blow to the entire profession?

By Ruth Marcus

Brad Karp’s cellphone rang on the evening of Tuesday, March 18th. It was the President of the United States. Karp, the chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the powerful New York law firm, had been trying to reach Donald Trump on the President’s personal cellphone for days, only to get his voice mail. Karp was desperate to find a way out from under an executive order targeting Paul, Weiss, which Trump had signed the previous Friday.

Trump’s order put Paul, Weiss on an Administration blacklist. Firm lawyers were barred from meeting with government employees or entering government buildings; firm clients were at risk of having their government contracts revoked. If the edict stood, Karp believed it would destroy the hundred-and-fifty-year-old firm, an enterprise that Karp had helped build into a behemoth with $2.6 billion in annual revenue, more than a thousand lawyers, and hefty profits per partner of $7.5 million. In an attempt to find an entrée to the White House, he had enlisted Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of Trump’s, to secure a Presidential audience. After Kraft assured the President that Paul, Weiss was willing to pledge millions in pro-bono legal work and to make other concessions, Trump was prepared to grant the meeting. He invited Karp to the White House.

And so ensued a remarkable session in the Oval Office. For more than ninety minutes, beginning around 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Karp met with the President of the United States; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; Steven Witkoff, the President’s Middle East envoy; and Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s outside legal counsel. Patched into the meeting by phone from New York was Robert Giuffra, the co-chair of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Paul, Weiss’s major competitors. Giuffra had been recently hired by Trump to represent him in the appeal of his conviction on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records. Now Giuffra was drafted to help negotiate the terms of an agreement.

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