Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paid

David Enrich delivers a withering study of how big law got into bed with the 45th president – Jones Day in particular

Donald Trump stiffed his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to the tune of $2.5m. He refused to grant him a pardon. The former New York City mayor is a target of prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia. Then again, as David Enrich of the New York Times writes in his new book, by the time Trump entered politics his “reputation for shortchanging his lawyers (and banks and contractors and customers) was well known”. Giuliani can’t say he wasn’t warned.

In Servants of the Damned, Enrich also recounts how Trump once attempted to settle a bill for nearly $2m.

“This isn’t the 1800s … You can’t pay me with a horse,” the unnamed lawyer replied.

Trump eventually coughed up. It was that or another lawsuit.

Enrich is the Times’ investigative editor. Dark Towers, his previous book, examined Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank. It also laid out the ties that bound Anthony Kennedy, the retired supreme court justice, to the Trump family. Kennedy’s son once worked at the bank. Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced Kennedy on the court, once clerked for the judge.

Servants of the Damned is informative and disturbing. In an unflattering portrait of the rise of big law, behemoth firms that reach around the globe, Enrich homes in on Jones Day. He tags other powerhouses – Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps and Baker McKenzie – for moral failures but repeatedly returns his gaze to the Cleveland-based Jones Day. It represented Trump.

Whether the intensity of Enrich’s disdain is deserved is debatable. The public holds lawyers in lower esteem than auto mechanics, nursing home operators, bankers and local politicians. On the other hand, lawyers fare better than reporters. Beyond that, the bar’s canons demand that lawyers zealously represent their clients. Reputational concern and the ease or difficulty of recruiting fresh talent and clients are often more potent restraints than finger-wagging.

Beginning in 2015, Jones Day was the Trump campaign’s outside counsel – which Enrich treats as an indelible stain. Almost six years later, he writes, the roof of Jones Day’s Washington office provided “a splendid view of a violent mob storming the Capitol”.

The insurrection, Enrich says, was the “predictable culmination of a president whom Jones Day had helped elect, an administration the firm’s lawyers had helped run, and an election whose integrity the firm had helped erode”.

Jones Day was not Trump’s post-election counsel, but Enrich assigns culpability. In the aftermath of the 2020 vote, one Trump White House insider lamented to the Guardian that Jones Day wrongly distanced itself from Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat. The campaign paid Jones Day millions. Gratitude and support, the insider said, were in order.

Jones Day lawyers marbled the administration. Don McGahn, a partner and a pillar of the conservative bar, was Trump’s first White House counsel. Trump made Noel Francisco solicitor general. Eric Dreiband led the civil rights division at the Department of Justice. All three are back at Jones Day. The revolving door is real.

McGahn played a critical role in filling the federal bench with conservative judges who had Federalist Society approval. He presided over a revolution, of sorts. Roe v Wade, the supreme court ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion, lies in tatters.

But when McGahn refused to cross the proverbial line during the Russia investigation, Trump soured on him. McGahn made and kept notes – to Trump’s consternation. McGahn quit in fall 2018. The following spring, Trump tweeted: “McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than [Robert] Mueller. Never a big fan!”

Enrich also sheds light on the unrest Trump caused within Jones Day, particularly among lawyers who identified as mainstream Republicans. In 2014, Ben Ginsberg and McGahn arrived from another DC law firm. Ginsberg possessed sterling GOP credentials. He had worked at the apex of George W Bush and Mitt Romney’s White House campaigns. Enrich describes his office as “a shrine to the old Republican party”.

But in the 2020 cycle, Ginsberg grew discomforted by the direction of Trump’s re-election bid. He called the president’s rhetoric “beyond the pale”. In late August, he resigned. Days later, he wrote a brutal column in the Washington Post, attacking Trump for pushing the lie of widespread election fraud and rubbishing mail-in voting.

“The president’s rhetoric,” he said, “has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out.” Republicans “risk harming the fundamental principle of our democracy: that all eligible voters must be allowed to cast their ballots. If that happens, Americans will deservedly render the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.”

Days before the election, Ginsberg warned that his party was “destroying itself on the altar of Trump”.

Then there was Donald Ayer, deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George HW Bush. After a clash with Dick Thornburgh, then attorney general, Ayer resigned. Bill Barr was his replacement. Ayer returned to Jones Day. In fall 2016, Ayer publicly voiced his opposition to Trump. In 2018, he retired. Before Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Ayer told Enrich Jones Day “should have gotten off the wagon, because [Trump] is a scoundrel”.

But in 2020, according to Open Secrets, the firm netted more than $19.2m in reported federal campaign spending. Trump was a golden ticket.

Jones Day has emerged as a “go-to firm for Republicans, mainstream and fringe alike”, as Enrich puts it. With sneakers, vodka and computers, branding matters. Law firms are a little different. Through that lens, Servants of the Damned is as much a rebuke of one large firm as it is an indictment of Trump’s Republican party.

• Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice is published in the US by HarperCollins

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