Former President Barack Obama slammed major law firms for bowing to the Trump administration to safeguard their careers and bankroll their lavish lifestyles.
Speaking at a private fundraiser in New Jersey on Friday, Obama voiced frustration that some of the nation’s top legal institutions had “set aside the law” in response to President Donald Trump’s actions, Business Insider reported.
Obama said some lawyers were giving way to Trump not because they were “going to be thrown in jail, but because they might lose a few clients and might not be able to finish that kitchen rehab at their Hampton house.”
“I’m not impressed,” Obama added, per MSNBC.
Obama’s connections to Big Law date back to his time at Harvard Law School, where he spent a summer as an associate at Sidley & Austin after his first year.
Before launching his political career, he practiced civil rights law at the Chicago-based litigation firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, Business Insider noted.
Since February, Trump has signed executive orders targeting major law firms such as Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, and Covington & Burling. The orders accused these firms of weaponizing the judicial system, revoked their security clearances, and triggered reviews of their government contracts.
Some firms, including Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis, opted to cooperate, agreeing to provide pro bono legal work for conservative causes. Others, like Perkins Coie and WilmerHale, pushed back and filed lawsuits challenging the administration’s actions, the outlet said.
In his remarks, Obama criticized universities that opted to strike compromises with the Trump administration.
Obama’s alma mater, Columbia University, ultimately yielded to the Trump administration’s demands after facing a $400 million cut in federal funding. The administration said the funding was slashed due to the university’s failure to address anti-Semitism amid campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
“If your core mission, if your core value is to teach, you may teach without compromising values of academic independence. Yeah, you may lose some grant money temporarily. That’s why you have those big endowments,” Obama said last week.
Meanwhile, Obama has continued his criticism of President Trump and his administration.
Speaking at The Connecticut Forum on June 17, Obama warned that the United States was on the brink of sliding into autocracy under Trump. “We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that,” Obama claimed.
Former President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is defending his decision to use an autopen for signing his final pardons, explaining the administration’s rationale for employing the device in a recently published interview.
The conversation with The New York Times focused specifically on his use of the autopen to execute the last round of clemency measures at the close of his term. In those final weeks, Biden granted pardons and clemency to over 1,500 individuals, what the White House described at the time as the largest single-day act of clemency by any U.S. president.
In his interview, Biden told the Times he “made every decision” on his own. “We’re talking about [granting clemency to] a whole lot of people,” Biden told the paper.
But that said, the Times reported that the then-president “did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people,” according to Biden himself and his aides.
“Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, [Biden] signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence,” the Times’s report said.
Instead of repeatedly requesting that the president sign updated versions of official documents, his staff employed an autopen to affix Biden’s signature to the final drafts.
His explanation came amid Republican criticism of his extensive use of the autopen on a large volume of formal paperwork.