Press. voanews.com
When Johnathan Smith resigned from the U.S. Justice Department on
Inauguration Day, he looked forward to spending time with his infant son, but
that plan unraveled a week later when President Donald Trump unveiled his
explosive foreign travel ban. Within two weeks, Smith had a new job as legal director of civil rights
group Muslim Advocates and was drafting briefs for a successful court challenge
to the ban, joining other former top Obama administration lawyers now fighting
Trump.
It is not surprising that Smith and some of his colleagues, political
appointees of Democratic President Barack Obama, would leave the Justice
Department now led by Republicans. What is unusual is how fast they have signed
up to be Trump adversaries. Some Republican lawyers say they were less hasty in moving into
oppositional roles post-election. George Terwilliger, a senior Justice Department
official under President George H.W. Bush, described the Obama lawyers' actions
as "unprecedented to my memory" and "really bad form."
One reason for the Obama lawyers' quick moves, some of them said, was
Trump's aggressive use of executive authority from day one, which was
guaranteed to attract court challenges. Obama faced legal fights over executive power and some of his
challengers were formerly lawyers for President George W. Bush, over issues
such as immigration and Obamacare. But those came later in Obama's presidency.
Besides Smith, other lawyers who have jumped into the fray include
former Attorney General Eric Holder, who is advising California's legislature
on challenging Trump over immigration, environmental regulations and health
care; and former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, who is helping Hawaii
contest Trump's revised travel ban.
Influential Manhattan prosecutor Preet Bharara and another 45 Obama-era
U.S. attorneys are out of jobs after the Trump administration asked them to
resign Friday. Many of the Obama lawyers keep in touch, but reject the notion,
proffered by some Republicans, that Obama is behind resistance efforts. Some of
the lawyers credit their rapid transition to Trump's hardline positions on key
issues and to ethical concerns about his presidency and business interests.
Norman Eisen, who was Obama's top ethics lawyer and later ambassador to
the Czech Republic, had expected to focus on his work at a think tank after
Trump's election. But instead, he said, "the ethics emergency of
constitutional dimensions has galvanized me back into my initial Obama
role."
Eisen is now also chairing Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington, a watchdog group he co-founded. The group has already sued Trump
over alleged ethics violations.
Other Obama appointees taking on Trump include former White House lawyer
Ian Bassin who has founded United to Protect Democracy, a new group probing
Trump over ethics; and James Cadogan, who worked with Smith at the Justice
Department, and is now at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, a civil
rights group already clashing with the new administration.
Some career government lawyers, who are not political appointees and
normally do not resign in power shifts, have also resigned to oppose Trump. One
is Sharon McGowan, who worked on LGBT issues at the Justice Department.
On Inauguration Day, she was offered a job as director of strategy at
Lambda Legal, an LGBT advocacy group. McGowan said she decided to leave Justice
when Trump named Jeff Sessions, a hardline conservative Alabama senator, to be
attorney general. That was a "game-changer," she said. "I knew
there would be no chance for me to preserve what I’ve been working on so
hard."
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