On May 28, 2025, 87 current and former leaders of bar associations in the District of Columbia, including former presidents and members of the Board of Governors of the District of Columbia Bar and five voluntary bar associations, filed an amicus brief in support of whistleblower attorney Mark Zaid, who is challenging what he calls “dangerous, unconstitutional retaliation” by the Trump administration in revoking his security clearance.
The amicus brief filed yesterday calls the President’s Executive Order “patently unlawful.”
“The President’s action being challenged in this litigation is not merely an attack on a single lawyer (or small handful of individual lawyers) but an assault on the vital underpinnings of the American legal process itself,” the brief asserted. “It would be hard to imagine any action that poses a graver danger to the Rule of Law than allowing a President to blackball a lawyer, summarily, by preventing the lawyer from having the necessary clearance to represent the interests of clients before government agencies.”
The brief was signed by 41 former leaders of the District of Columbia Bar, many of whom also signed amicus briefs in support of four law firms – Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, and Susman Godfrey – that the President sought to bar from representing clients before government agencies. The former D.C. Bar leaders were joined by 46 other current and past leaders of several District of Columbia voluntary bar associations, including the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the Women’s Bar Association, the National Bar Association, and The Washington Bar Association, and by former members of the Board of Governors of the District of Columbia Bar.
Read the amicus brief
DC Leaders for Rule of Law 