Trinidad and Tobago-born Sparkle Sooknanan, who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16, became a high-powered attorney, clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, working in the Department of Justice and becoming , at age 35, partner with Jones Day. , the 129-year-old law firm with 40 offices worldwide and 2,500 lawyers. Then she left.
Her reason? Jones Day was fully committed to the candidacy of Donald Trump, his administration and then his legal efforts to prove that voter fraud prevented his re-election. But it was when Jones Day joined an effort to overturn the results in Pennsylvania that Sooknanan declared that the firm was in it “for no other reason than to deny poor people the right to vote.” Her comment is reported in an excerpt from the forthcoming book, “Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice,” written by New York Times business investigations editor David Enrich and excerpted in The New York Times Magazine.
Enrich peels back the veil on Jones Day’s involvement, along with the Federalist Society, in making Trump president and then packing the US Supreme Court and federal judiciary with right-wing ideologues considered credible in a decades-long push to destroyed the “administrative state”. Top billing goes to Jones Day star Don McGahn, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, became White House counsel and used that powerful office to fill the judiciary with like-minded lawyers. He had the support of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, who refused to hold hearings on President Barack Obama’s nominees.
“With McGahn in charge of selecting judicial nominees, the White House had appointed more than 130 judges to federal courts in a span of 21 months,” Enrich writes. “By the time they were confirmed, fully a quarter of the appellate panel had returned.” This, he says, was “a testament to McGahn’s commitment to the cause of rebuilding the federal judiciary. … It soon became difficult to tell where Jones Day’s interests ended and those of the Trump administration began.”
Jones Day lawyers went back to the mothership or elsewhere after Biden’s election. One of them, James Uthmeier, became Ron DeSantis’ chief of staff, leaving observers to wonder what role he has played in fueling real and fabricated grievances against the Florida governor.
Jones Day’s imprimatur was one of two coveted endorsements Trump received for 2016, the other coming from the Council on National Policy, whose support, Columbia University professor Anne Nelson writes in her book “The Web of Shadows,” was significantly increased by the work of the leaders. Christian Fundamentalists, the Conservative Revival of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a vast network of churches and broadcast media.
Meanwhile, Barre Seid, owner of the Chicago-based electronics manufacturing company Tripp Lite, made a secret donation of $1.6 billion—perhaps the largest political gift ever—to the Marble Freedom Trust that Leonard A. Leo, a leader of Federal Society, created recently. The Times reported. “The cash infusion was organized through an unusual series of transactions that appear to have avoided tax obligations,” The Times said. “The Marble Freedom Trust can help conservatives level the playing field — if not surpass the left — on such nonprofit spending, which is commonly called dark money because the groups involved can raise and spend unlimited amounts on political, while revealing little about where they got the money or how they spent it.”
The Washington Post editorial board criticized the donation because of its secretive nature and because Leo “has been on a crusade, with surprising success, to transform the country’s politics.” The Post said Said avoided paying capital gains taxes by not selling his company separately. Instead, he donated his Tripp Lite shares to the Marble Freedom Trust, which, as a social welfare organization, is exempt from paying taxes. The trust then sold the company for $1.6 billion. This is how “everyday taxpayers essentially fund the extravagant spending of the privileged few who use their knowledge to avoid their obligations and distort the political landscape.”
Trump’s “America First” movement stalled after he lost in 2020, but is kept alive by his relentless insistence that he won, which resonates with his base, giving him absolute control of the Republican Party and feeding his thirst for him for revenge. The party also failed to take control of Congress, but is trying to do so now and the presidency in 2024 through mass attacks, especially in the Trump-friendly South. The party has not proposed a platform beyond “Trumpism” and the cultural war. Democrats, meanwhile, have scored impressive legislative victories but have seemed too shy to toot their own horn. Writing in the Nation, Morehouse College professor Ben Burgis and University of Washington instructor Daniel Bessner argue that Democrats need to refocus their attention away from Trump and the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. For them, “the only The only way to defeat Trumpism is for progressives to do a better job than Trumpists of mobilizing populist anger.”
“The reality is that the Republicans are not going to overthrow our semi-democratic institutions. . . . The threat they pose is that they will win the election . . . and impose their deregulatory, environmentally destructive, union-busting and cruel agenda on the American people. laws that target marginalized groups,” Bessner and Burgis say. “And whatever liberals want to believe, this threat will not be countered by appealing to respect for the establishment or by conjuring notions of noble resistance. The only way to defeat reactionary populism is with a better appeal to the populace.” David Pepper, an Ohio politician who wrote the book “Laboratories of Autocracy,” shares this view. He told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that the emergency facing Democrats is a collapse of representative democracy in statehouses, many of which “no longer have representative democracy. Because they have been deceived, they do not reflect the will of the people.” Pepper believes the “Republican assault on democracy” preceded Trump and even “if Trump were to shut down tomorrow, it would continue.”
Americans, too, agree, telling pollsters that democracy is their top concern. And Biden, speaking at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Maryland on August 25, declared: “It’s not just Trump, it’s the whole philosophy that supports — I’ll say something, it’s like semi-fascism. You should vote for him literally save democracy again.” The president is expected to expand on the topic in a speech scheduled for Thursday.
Sooknanan and a handful of others who resigned from Jones Day may have also seen the light, as have several Republican elected officials who rejected Trump’s call to help overturn the 2020 election results and are voted out of office as part of the former president’s revenge campaign.
