The administration is trying to sell early access to the president’s thoughts, and DLA Piper is the Biglaw firm defending it.
Freedom of the Press Foundation and The Intercept Media sued the president and White House officials last month, saying efforts to charge for advance access to his government announcements via Truth Social are “extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional.” The product at issue is Truth API, a data feed Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. rolled out over the summer that charges subscribers $60,000 to $100,000 a month for faster access to the president’s market-moving posts. The president, for his part, is Trump Media’s largest shareholder, with a stake worth roughly $1 billion held in a trust overseen by Donald Trump Jr.
So the president announces military operations, ceasefires, and the firing of agency heads on a platform he owns, and the company he owns sells a head start on those announcements to anyone with six figures a month to spare. You do not need a Con Law seminar to spot the problem.
But according to reporting by Bloomberg Law, Trump Media (which isn’t a party to the lawsuit) hired DLA Piper to defend the proposition. DLA Piper partner Caryn Schechtman and other firm attorneys submitted a letter as counsel for the company on Tuesday, arguing against the preliminary injunction sought by the two organizations. The firm’s argument is that the plaintiffs are trying “to constitutionalize TMTG’s independent commercial decisions regarding the distribution of publicly available content.”
Publicly available? I mean, eventually.
“Independent” is also doing some heavy lifting in a sentence about a company whose largest shareholder is the guy generating the content… which happens to be official government announcements. Fifty-three former federal prosecutors and agents don’t see it as a simple business decision either; in an amicus brief backing the injunction, they told the court the scheme likely implicates federal corruption laws. The preliminary injunction hearing is set for October 7 in Manhattan.
If Schechtman’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s been busy. In May, she signed Trump’s Third Circuit brief in the Central Park Five defamation case. This summer, she and fellow partner Mike Walsh joined Trump’s legal team fighting the Jan. 6 lawsuits brought by injured Capitol police officers and members of Congress.
Which is a remarkable client list for the firm that, in January 2021, was the largest of 19 to sign a letter urging Mike Pence and the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, declaring Trump “unfit for office, and a reckless and wanton threat to the Constitution that he pledged to preserve, protect, and defend.”
Personally handling Trump’s legal matters remains the most direct route to his good side, and his good side has spent the last year and a half rewarding loyalty and punishing its absence across Biglaw. DLA Piper has clearly done the math.
Earlier: In 2021, DLA Piper Wanted Trump Removed Over The Capitol Riot. Today, It’s On Trump’s Jan. 6 Legal Team.
DLA Piper Partner Backs Trump Central Park 5 Defamation Case
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1