President Trump’s attempt to ban Perkins Coie lawyers from entering federal buildings has already resulted in a temporary restraining order.
President Trump issued an executive order last week that accuses Perkins Coie of “dishonest and dangerous activity” and seeks to impose several punitive measures, including suspending security clearances held by Perkins Coie employees and prohibiting government contractors from retaining the firm. It also bars the firm’s employees from federal buildings, and prohibits federal employees from engaging with Perkins Coie staff.
At a hearing in federal court in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of the executive order. Ruling from the bench, Howell said the president’s order against Perkins Coie is clearly intended to punish the firm, and likely violates its First, Fifth and Sixth amendment rights.
“Our justice system is based on the fundamental belief that justice works best when all parties have zealous advocates,” she said. “That fundamental promise extends to all parties, even those with unpopular ideas or beliefs or causes disliked by President Trump.”
All of this goes back to Hillary Clinton who hired Perkins Coie as her law firm in 2016. Perkins then took over paying for the generation of what came to be known as the Steele Dossier, a mish-mash of false claims that was the left’s dominant news topic (Russia, Russia, Russia!) for all of 2017.
But the attempt to punish Perkins Coie is just one aspect of a wider attack on left-wing money and infrastructure. The Trump administration is making an effort to “cut the legs out” from under the left.
Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come…
Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law…
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, did not directly address the accusation that the administration’s actions were aimed at crippling the left. “The Democrats don’t need President Trump to dismantle the Democratic Party,” he said in a statement. “They are self-destructing with their radical policies.”…
The billionaire Elon Musk, the top Trump donor leading the administration’s cost-cutting initiative, has appeared to encourage investigations of institutions that form the financial backbone of the left. They include ActBlue, the donation platform that helps fund virtually the entire Democratic Party and that congressional Republicans are already probing, and Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm that manages difficult-to-trace “dark money” groups that collectively have spent billions of dollars helping Democrats and their causes.
The left has already formed a coalition of groups to fight back.
“The breadth is breathtaking,” said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans Against Government Censorship, a coalition of progressive groups and labor unions created last year to defend against an anticipated Republican assault. Taken together, Mr. Leiter said, the efforts amounted to an attempt “to cut the legs out from their opposition.”
Despite this, ActBlue seems to be in trouble with a series of senior officials bailing out.
ActBlue, the online fund-raising organization that powers Democratic candidates, has plunged into turmoil, with at least seven senior officials resigning late last month and a remaining lawyer suggesting he faced internal retaliation.
The departures from ActBlue, which helps raise money for Democrats running for office at all levels of government, come as the group is under investigation by congressional Republicans. They have advanced legislation that some Democrats warn could be used to debilitate what is the party’s leading fund-raising operation.
It’s still not clear why this is happening but some have speculated that the lawyers are fleeing because ActBlue is essentially indefensible.
Done some reporting on ActBlue and here’s almost no doubt in my mind they’ve been willfully enabling illegal donations for almost their entire existence and have gotten away with it. https://t.co/2RzFp3oVke
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) March 7, 2025
As for Arabella Advisors, the Free Press recently reported they are behind a bunch of Astroturf protests funded by left-wing billionaires.
Days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a group of former Joe Biden and Kamala Harris staffers came together to launch an effort to arouse the public against the GOP’s looming push to cut taxes on the wealthy. Dubbed “Families Over Billionaires,” the project quickly assembled an eight-figure war chest…
Families Over Billionaires owes its existence not to small-dollar donations from ordinary Americans, or to grassroots organizers, but to a single entity: the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, which oversees a massive “dark money” network bankrolled by the super-rich and aligned with the Democratic Party.
The network relies on support from billionaires like Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Democratic megadonor George Soros. In other words, it’s not Families Over Billionaires so much as it’s billionaires over other billionaires.
“The Resistance is almost pure astroturf, not grassroots,” said Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank that investigates left-leaning philanthropies. “It’s a plaything of megadonors uninterested in ordinary Americans’ money.”
One of the partners of Families Over Billionaires is Indivisible, the group that has been arranging protests around the country aimed at Republican lawmakers and Tesla dealerships. All of this Astroturf effort then gets reported by left-wing media outlets as if it were a grassroots uprising against the Trump administration.
In an appearance on Mr. Cruz’s podcast that was filmed inside the White House, Mr. Musk claimed that Arabella’s groups and ActBlue were part of a “left-wing N.G.O. cabal” that was organizing and funding protests of his electric automaker Tesla. He called the protests, which have included vandalism of Tesla dealerships and charging stations, “terrorist activity,” and Mr. Cruz suggested it should be prosecuted.
Arabella has denied everything of course. The question now is whether congress will take up investigations of these groups in the same way that Democrats targeted Republican-leaning groups in the past. That efforts seems to be just getting underway.
