In 2025, Steve Bannon said the quiet part out loud, on his own podcast, when it came to the Trump administration’s goals when issuing (unconstitutional) executive orders aimed at Biglaw firms. Bannon said of the targeted firms, “What we are trying to do is put you out of business and bankrupt you.” Now the ABA wants to know how much of that he was really involved with.
In a Tuesday filing in American Bar Association v. Executive Office of the President, the ABA asked U.S. District Judge Amir Ali to force the White House to hand over internal communications, including those involving Bannon and Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s personal senior counsel. According to reporting, Epshteyn connected two firms that struck deals with the administration, Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, with the Commerce Department on matters related to U.S. trade negotiations.
The ABA sued the administration back in June 2025, arguing that the executive orders, plus the wave of “deals” that spooked firms into capitulating before an order ever came for them, amounted to a coordinated policy, not isolated grievances against a handful of firms. As noted when the suit was first filed, the ABA had reason to worry about standing before it ever got to the merits, given this particular Supreme Court’s track record on associational standing.
Those worries didn’t pan out, at least not yet. In April, Judge Ali rejected the DOJ’s motion to dismiss, finding the ABA had plausibly alleged a real threat of retaliation and a documented chilling effect on its members, including instances of firms declining pro bono work seen as adverse to the administration. That ruling is what put the case into the discovery fight now playing out over Bannon, Epshteyn, and the rest of the internal White House record.
The underlying grievance predates the ABA suit by months, of course. Four firms — Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey — fought their individual executive orders in court and won, repeatedly, sweeping the district court level on First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment grounds. Nine other firms didn’t fight, cutting deals worth roughly $940 million in pro bono commitments to Trump-approved causes instead. And DOJ’s posture toward the winning firms has been anything but consistent: in March, the department dropped its appeals of those district court losses, only to reverse course about two weeks later and go back to defending the orders, this time citing the nine capitulating firms as proof the policy worked exactly as designed.
The DOJ, as you’d expect, does not want to produce any of this. The government has argued the requests raise separation-of-powers concerns and are overbroad, and last week, it asked a federal court in New York to block the ABA from deposing Epshteyn altogether. Whether that gambit works is now Judge Ali’s problem; DOJ’s response to the ABA’s Tuesday brief is due July 17.
Hellbound and Down 