Politico: “Paul, Weiss wasn’t the first firm to be the focus of such an executive order, but it would go on to be the first to negotiate a deal with the White House in order to get it lifted. At the time, the firm’s leader Brad Karp said he was trying to save his team from an ‘existential crisis.’”

“Since then, the firm has endured. But the decision to strike a deal has led to high-profile departures among partners and drawn condemnation from Democrats and others in the legal community.”

“After Karp made a deal with Trump, at least 10 partners in the litigation department have resigned from the firm, including several with close ties to Democrats. A group of the departing partners have joined together to start their own firm where they will continue to represent tech giants like Meta and Google, and another has jumped ship to one of the four firms that chose to fight the administration in court.”

Washington Post: “Across President Donald Trump’s administration, a creeping culture of secrecy is overtaking personnel and budget decisions, casual social interactions, and everything in between, according to interviews with more than 40 employees across two dozen agencies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. No one wants to put anything in writing anymore, federal workers said: Meetings are conducted in-person behind closed doors, even on anodyne topics. Workers prefer to talk outdoors, as long as the weather cooperates. And communication among colleagues — whether work-related or personal — has increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete.”

“It’s not just career staffers who are clamming up, fearful they will be tagged as rebellious or resistant to Trump’s policies and dismissed amid the administration’s push to trim the workforce, fulfilling the president’s promise to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse. Trump’s own political appointees are also resistant to writing things down, worried that their agency’s deliberations will appear in news coverage and inspire a hunt for leakers, federal workers said.”

“Through silence or vocal support, House and Senate Republicans are backing an extraordinary set of new precedents for presidential power they may come to regret if and when Democrats seize those same powers,” Axios reports.

“New precedents are exhilarating when you’re in power — and excruciating when you’re not.”