Federal courts cannot review President Donald Trump’s executive orders denying security clearance to anyone or any group of people, even if those orders target all Asians or Hispanics, Catholics or Jews, a lawyer for the Trump administration told a federal appeals court Thursday.
“It is not reviewable,” Abhishek Kambli, a lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department, told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
But the attorney for the four law firms argued that President Trump’s EOs targeting them last year had nothing to do with national security, but instead were motivated by viewpoint discrimination.
“The executive orders here strike at the heart of the First Amendment and the ability if lawyers to zealously represent their client,” Paul Clement, a conservative lawyer representing Houston-based Susman Godfrey and three other firms. “The four law firms here were not singled out because they had unusual hiring practices or demonstrated problems handling classified materials. Instead, they were singled out because they represented clients or associated with attorneys who raised the president’s ire. The executive orders run afoul of the better part of the Bill of Rights.”
“Lawyers cannot zealously represent their clients while walking on eggshells for fear of reprisals. The executive orders strike at the heart of the rule of law,” Clement said.
Last March and April, President Trump issued two-page executive orders against Susman Godfrey and three other firms, claiming that the firms, their lawyers and the clients they represent “weaponized the American legal system and degraded the quality of American elections.” The president also accused the firms of illegal racial discrimination in their hiring practices.
Susman Godfrey and the other law firms sued the Trump administration in federal court. Last June, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan of Washington, D.C., ruled that the president’s executive order targeting Susman Godfrey was an illegal act of retaliation that also violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Three other federal judges ruled essentially the same way, permanently enjoining the president’s orders against Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner Block from being enforced.
The Justice Department appealed to the D.C. Court of Appeals, arguing that the district judges exceeded their authority and that the orders also violate President Trump’s free speech rights.
The three-judge panel includes Judges Sri Srinivasan and Cornelia Pillard, appointees of President Barack Obama, and Judge Neomi Rao, an appointee of President Trump, a conservative jurist, former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and champion of the Federalist Society.
The D.C. Circuit had set aside 20 minutes or oral argument for each side, but the judges had so many questions that the arguments lasted more than two hours.
Kambli focused the government’s argument on a D.C. Circuit Court case from 2024, Lee v. Garland, in which the appellate court ruled that national security clearance issues like this are not reviewable by the courts.
“The district courts here rushed to judgment on executive orders that they clearly didn’t like the content of, and in the process, granted relief that they were not authorized to do,” he said.
Clement said that was a misreading of Lee because the case involved specific individuals — not the entire staff at multiple law firms.
“The government offers no merits defense of these suspensions of security clearances whatsoever,” Clement said. “They are not well-positioned to come here and say that the president works more quickly than the rest of us. So, he was able to take into account all 13 factors in suspending all of these security clearances.”
Clement pointed out to the judges that a Perkins Coie lawyer on Feb. 12, 2025, was “granted a security clearance based on an individualized, exhaustive process.”
“Thirteen weeks later, it was taken away — not based on any individualized consideration — and suspended for every member of the law firm, including people who were about to go serve as military reserve officers,” Clement argued. “There is no precedent for that. Since World War II, we have had this unbroken process for security clearance, but then we have this.”
The executive orders were issued for two purposes, Clement told the judges: to punish the law firms he disliked and intimidate other law firms into concessions.
“This was shouted from the rooftops,” Clement argued. “And part of the point of shouting it from the rooftops was to get the Paul Weisses of the world, the Kirkland Ellises of the world, the Latham and Watkinses of the world, to come and make deals with the government and volunteer close to a billion dollars in free legal services.”
Clement also argued that the executive order issued against the New York law firm Paul Weiss is evidence that President Trump’s contention that these firms are national security risks is a farce. He pointed out that the president slapped Paul Weiss with the executive order, declaring them a threat and then rescinded the order one week later after the firm agreed to do tens of millions of dollars in free legal work for causes approved by the Trump administration.
Clement noted that Paul Weiss did nothing specific to make its lawyers more trustworthy.