01/05/2023
If lawyer-turned-bestselling novelist John Grisham (breakthrough best-seller: The Firm) were an immigration patriot (he isn’t) he’d find a trove of source material in the legal powerhouses that are using the courts and sympathetic kritarchs to dispossess and replace the American people. Tops among them: New York City–based Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, aka Paul, Weiss, which represents illegal-alien and other immigrant clients, and wages never-ending lawfare against the Historic American Nation.
With roughly a thousand lawyers at its Avenue of the Americas headquarters and eight satellite offices, the firm rakes in about $1.5 billion annually. Paul, Weiss, has plenty of rainmakers to fill its coffers and pursue pro bono activism. Annual profit per partner: $6 million [Paul Weiss Set to Crack Rare $6 Million Profit Per Partner Mark, by Bloomberg Law, October 2, 2021] . Only a few litigation titans such as Davis, Polk & Wardwell and Kirkland & Ellis sail in those rich waters.
The firm’s partners include top Obama-era officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jeannie Rhee. Following her first-term tenure, Rhee defended former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a lawsuit that sought access to Clinton’s private emails. Rhee later joined Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Donald Trump’s “Russian collusion” during the 2016 presidential election [Robert Mueller hires star lawyers for team, by Andrea Noble, Washington Times, July 4, 2017]. That “collusion,” of course, turned out to be a hoax manufactured by the Clinton campaign [How the Sussmann trial revealed Hillary Clinton’s role in the Alfa Bank scandal, by Jonathan Turley, The Hill, May 21, 2022]. In addition, Hakeem Jeffries, incoming House Democrat leader, began his career as a Paul, Weiss associate.
Founded in 1875, Paul, Weiss is organized around a wide range of practice groups. Clients include many corporations; its mergers and acquisitions group has about 150 attorneys. But racial egalitarianism, and lately gender egalitarianism, along with Open Borders lawfare, define the firm’s mission. Paul, Weiss represented the Scottsboro boys in the 1930s, assisted plaintiff’s attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, and represented lesbian activist Edith Windsor in her successful 2013 Supreme Court challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act.
BREAKING: We sued ICE, with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, to release immigrants detained in crowded jails in Calhoun, Monroe and St. Clair counties immediately, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. https://t.co/u0LgBYMkz7
— ACLU of Michigan (@ACLUofMichigan) April 8, 2020
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is all in with the Holy Church of Diversity, proclaims its website:
The firm has been committed to inclusion since its founding — a dedication that has shaped the intellectual and cultural character of Paul, Weiss over many decades. Most elite law firms profess a devotion to diversity and inclusion, but none can match Paul, Weiss’s history of putting it into practice.
To emphasize his point, Brad Karp, chairman of the firm since 2008, called the death of George Floyd “the culmination of systemic racism in our country,” as Bloomberg Law reported above.
More broadly, Paul, Weiss is on board with Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria that measure corporate progress in serving societal “stakeholders” as well as company shareholders. “ESG is going to affect every aspect of the law firm world, law firm operations, and the interaction with their clients going forward,” Karp vowed to Bloomberg Law. “The law firm community hasn’t picked up on how profound that will be.”
The legal world should pick up that ESG is a morally charged, leftist shakedown of publicly traded companies. Institutional investors with large corporate holdings, led by BlackRock (and its CEO Larry Fink), which had $8.5 trillion in assets under management as of midyear 2022, use their equity positions as leverage to squeeze resistant corporations into compliance.
Paul, Weiss is very much a player. And it wants compliance to occur smoothly. Several months ago, it instituted a Civil Rights and Racial Equity Audit Practice to help corporate clients avoid costly anti-discrimination lawsuits. The firm explains what this would entail:
Amid an environment of increased shareholder expectations, scrutiny and accountability around corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) commitments, Paul, Weiss’s Civil Rights and Racial Equity Audit Practice group offers an independent examination of racial and gender equity within an organization, and a concrete plan of action to address potential gaps in a thoughtful, timely and transparent manner aligned with each organization’s unique business interests and priorities. Paul, Weiss’s team of former senior government lawyers, experienced litigators and environmental, social and governance (ESG) experts approach these audits with the same rigor and thoroughness of any type of internal investigation.
[Paul, Weiss Launches Dedicated Civil Rights and Racial Equity Audit Practice, PaulWeiss.com, July 19, 2022]
“Companies and investment firms are increasingly under pressure from shareholders, employees and customers to certify that public commitments to DE&I are being fulfilled,” said Paul, Weiss torpedo Loretta Lynch:
A racial equity or civil rights audit is a powerful tool that companies can deploy to actively address potential gaps, get ahead of any risks and ensure that their actions are aligned with their values. No firm has more experience in these matters than Paul, Weiss.
Let’s cut through the bureaucratic happy talk. This is about money and power. In return for a generous fee, Paul, Weiss will advise corporations on how to ward off the radical leftists whom the firm supports on principle anyway!
In other words, the firm wants corporations to think exactly like their anti-white accusers — as if corporations don’t already do that, apropos of Coca-Cola’s anti-white law firm scandal. This audit program is akin to Mafia enforcers offering “protection” and “security” to small business owners in return for regular cash payments.
With that background, one should hardly be surprised about the firm’s aggressive, reprehensible push for Open Borders. Paul, Weiss led many challenges to Trump-era immigration restriction initiatives. Its website celebrates those victories that will turn America into a diverse amalgam of Third World cultures, spicing things up a bit with sentimental Treason Lobby cliches:
We have long focused on providing pro bono legal services to vulnerable immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the organizations that serve these population.
In recent years, this work has become even more urgent given the rising number of assaults on the rights of our immigrant communities. We have made it part of our strategic mission to provide a systematic response.
We helped coordinate the legal community’s response to the crisis brought on by the forced separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, and have helped to reunify hundreds of separated families. We were among the first to come to the aid of affected travelers at Dulles and JFK airports and among the last to leave when President Trump issued the first “travel ban” executive order.
[Immigration, Refugees, & Asylum Paul Weiss.com]
Paul, Weiss plays to win — and it wins a lot, reported the release about its efforts on behalf of the Great Replacement:
Paul, Weiss’s strategic role in the Great Replacement should not be underestimated. The firm has a sterling reputation and an armful of awards. Not too many people want to get in its way. The Biden administration certainly doesn’t. Neither do the firm’s Obama legacy hires.
Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security secretary from December 2013 to January 2017, has been with Paul, Weiss on and off since 1984, and believes that admitting migrants from Central America without vetting is our humanitarian duty.
This is what he said four years ago:
[Y]ou’re never going to fully address illegal migration unless you address the underlying causes of illegal migration, the powerful push factors that motivate a mother or a father to send their child through Mexico to the United States in the first place.
[Jeh Johnson On Immigration And Trump, NPR.org, June 9, 2018]
Of course, Paul, Weiss is hardly the only litigation shop pushing open borders and the Great Replacement on humanitarian grounds. Davis Wright Tremaine (Seattle), for example, joined a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and its affiliates to block President Trump’s January 2017 misnomered “Muslim ban” that stopped immigration from terrorist countries [ACLU Files Suit Demanding Documents on Implementation of Muslim Ban, DavisVanguard.org, April 14, 2017]. And in May 2020, Winston & Strawn (Chicago) joined several other nonprofit plaintiffs, including the American Immigration Council, to compel the release of records on the Migrant Protection Protocols (“Remain in Mexico”) with the intent of rendering the program inoperable [US: Lawsuit Over ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program Secrecy, American Immigration Lawyers Association, May 14, 2020].
Our lawsuit, on behalf of @ResistenciaNW, alleging @ICEGov unconstitutionally targets immigration activists in retaliation for their protected speech, can proceed. A federal judge has rejected (for the second time) the govt’s motion to dismiss. https://t.co/fDLlcXFRS0 pic.twitter.com/3aqDI63YyY
— Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (@DWTLaw) October 8, 2020
Maria Kutnick — @WinstonLaw pro bono attorney — spoke to @qz about the firm’s efforts to support DACA beneficiaries in renewing their immigration status during COVID-19: https://t.co/5Ijd5GiUYF pic.twitter.com/rbIcSZAWPD
— Winston & Strawn LLP (@WinstonLaw) April 17, 2020
The mutually reinforcing relationships between law firms, government agencies, globalist corporations and nonprofit groups are arguably the main obstacle to Patriotic Immigration Reform. Perhaps a renegade populist immigration lawyer — a John Grisham of the right — will emerge from obscurity to write a novel.
On second thought, maybe he should stick with nonfiction. In a country whose borders are fully open, truth just might be stranger than fiction.
Carl Horowitz is a veteran Washington, D.C.-area writer on immigration and other issues
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.