President Donald Trump listens during a cabinet meeting, Friday, July 31, 2026, at Camp David, the presidential retreat, near Thurmont, Md. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
The DOJ submitted a declaration from a White House lawyer on Monday to swat away the American Bar Association’s discovery demands, claiming they threaten to “produce information identifying” senior advisers who authored President Donald Trump’s “permanently enjoined” law firm executive orders.
In a notice, the DOJ said that the Executive Office of the President “strongly object[s]” to U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s Aug. 3 order, which attempted to “narrow” the existing discovery “impasse” between the ABA and the government by opening the door to naming names “at issue” for two specific requests.
The ABA is suing to uncover the origins of Trump’s “unprecedented and uniquely dangerous” executive orders, which targeted Big Law with the threat of tearing up government contracts and security clearances.
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Through these document requests, numbered 11 and 12, the ABA aims to discover “all individuals who participated in the drafting, editing, publishing, review, or approval of Law Firm Orders, including who first proposed the idea, who drafted the orders, who reviewed them, and who approved them” and the “policy team” members outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned in April, whom she said were “executing on [Trump’s] directive to hold Big Law accountable for their weaponization of justice and their lies.”
But according to the DOJ, the judge’s order to “file a notice with the court identifying the names of the individuals” or “explain the basis for the privilege” to withhold the names is “contrary to the critical separation of powers principles” that the Supreme Court “articulated” in support of then-Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004.
Ali issued a “problematic” ruling to “force the President to assert privilege over broad requests” in an instance “where there is no basis for discovery at all,” the DOJ said.
Trump’s orders targeting Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, and Susman Godfrey — the firm representing the ABA — “have already been permanently enjoined, and the validity of those injunctions are currently on appeal in the D.C. Circuit,” the government noted.
“To the extent discovery is appropriate at all,” the Trump administration went on, “it should not proceed against the White House, per Cheney—especially not since the ABA can still avail itself of information from its own members, public sources, agency defendants (which are still producing records), and third parties (which have only just begun to produce records).”
Along with the notice, the DOJ filed a declaration from Deputy Counsel to the President Gary Lawkowski, who “formally invok[ed] the presidential communications privilege” and warned of a “chilling effect” if these names are, in fact, named.
“[T]hese individuals are senior White House advisors and their staffs who have broad and significant responsibility for investigating and formulating advice in connection with presidential decision making, including specifically on the matter at issue in the above-captioned case, and people communicating with senior White House advisors and their staffs in the furtherance of providing advice and counsel to the President regarding the same,” Lawkowski said. “The disclosure of the names of these individuals would reveal information that is inextricably intertwined with the President’s decision-making process in the matter at issue in the above-captioned case and the President’s deliberations with his advisors.”
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