Starting in October as the president election neared, four major law firms began removing references on their websites to work their lawyers had done on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian influence and possible coordination with Donald Trump's campaign. Bloomberg Law found the deletions from the lawyers' biographies by analyzing current and archived firm web pages. Trump had promised to go after lawyers and the firms that worked against him.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Garrison & Wharton, one of the four firms, took out a reference to Mueller's work in L. Rush Atkinson's biography on March 1, two weeks before Trump issued an executive order restricting the firm's government access. The firm then reached a deal with Trump that calls for it to provide $40 million in free legal services in support of the president's agenda. Atkinson had been an assistant special counsel to Mueller before joining the firm last year.
WilmerHale, where Mueller was a partner, took his biography page down entirely. And it took a mention of service in the special counsel's office from a retired partner's page. Cooley dropped a paragraph describing a partner as one of Mueller's "top deputies," per Bloomberg. Davis Polk & Wardwell also took the Mueller investigation off a couple of lawyers' bios. A former pardons attorney at the Justice Department called the deletions acts of appeasement at a time when the firms should be defending their lawyers' right to work on cases unpopular with Trump. "I think that's a very dangerous phenomenon," Liz Oyer said. (More Robert Mueller stories.)
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