DOJ’s Kambli Entrusted to Pull Off Win in Trump-Big Law Fight

The last lawyer who defended President Donald Trump’s attacks against law firms lost four times and fled to a MAGA think tank. If anyone can now salvage at least a partial win, it might be Abhishek Kambli.

The Justice Department lawyer is invigorated by tough cases and prefers an uphill battle to an easy win, former colleagues said. His reputation as a strategist who brings intensity to his cases—beneath a measured, relaxed courtroom style—gives him at least a fighting chance in the law firm cases, they say.

“The folks on the other side are outnumbered by Abhi,” said Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan, who co-counseled with Kambli earlier in his career. “Nobody is going to do more research and put forward a stronger argument.”

He’ll need all the skill he can muster to reverse DOJ’s losing ways on the law firm orders when he presents oral arguments to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit next month. Kambli will square off against an army of Big Law attorneys that have supporting briefs from a broad swath of the legal industry.

He will attempt to sway an appellate panel that Trump’s sanctions last year against four law firms—Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey—are within the president’s constitutional powers to address national security risks and hiring discrimination in the legal profession. Four lower courts struck down as unconstitutional the orders that threatened to restrict lawyers’ access to government buildings, cancel clients’ government contracts, and revoke lawyers’ security clearances.

The deputy associate attorney general came to the case in October after DOJ attorney Richard Lawson, who struggled in court to give details about the orders and their impact, left the department for America First Policy Institute.

The active involvement of Kambli’s associate attorney general office shows an unwillingness by the Justice Department’s career lawyers to take on the case, said Vanita Gupta, who served as associate attorney general under President Joe Biden.

A former DOJ lawyer, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations at the department, said former colleagues viewed the White House’s executive orders as hard to defend and poorly written. In the eyes of agency leadership, Kambli was the most competent attorney willing to take the case, the ex-DOJ lawyer said.

DOJ declined to comment for this article, while Kambli didn’t return requests for comment.

By taking on the difficult Trump law firm case, Kambli gets the chance to prove his mettle to the administration by producing a favorable outcome against the odds. “For political appointees controlled by the president, there could be a benefit to defending the president’s more outrageous executive orders,” said Clayton Bailey, a former DOJ lawyer under President Joe Biden.

Immigrant Roots

Kambli was 3 when his parents immigrated from India to the US. He grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut where he said in a 2024 podcast that his father worked at a gas station and mother worked at a bank. He graduated from University of the Arts in Philadelphia and got his law degree at Notre Dame in 2012.

He spent the next seven years as a lawyer for the US Air Force, where his work included representing an accused 9/11 conspirator before the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay. The Defense Department said in 2024 it reached a plea agreement with Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who was accused of helping finance the 2001 terror attacks. Kambli continues to serve as appellate counsel in the Air Force Reserves as a lieutenant colonel.

Kambli seeks to drown out the politics surrounding his cases and approaches his work with the same loyalty he employed in the service, said Peter Rose, a friend of Kambli’s from his Air Force years who is now an associate general counsel of the Defense Health Agency.

“All the extraneous stuff in life and whatever is going on in the world or politically—it’s like the Charlie Brown teacher with him,” Rose said. “He’s very much focused on the mission.”

Kambli spent most of the Biden administration as a prosecutor for the Southern District of Indiana in Indianapolis. He worked on cases that were part of an initiative to crack down on domestic violence.

While in Indianapolis, he began to feel something was wrong in the country, he said in the 2024 podcast interview.

“I saw what was effectively a nation on the decline unless something changed,” Kambli said. “Given that I had young kids, I really wanted to do something that was actively changing the trajectory of where we were going and how we were getting there.”

Conservative Chops

He went to Kansas in 2023 and worked as state deputy attorney general for a little more than a year. He built credibility among conservatives after successfully challenging Biden-era Title IX protections for transgender students and student loan forgiveness.

Kambli last year was part of a wave of lawyers in red state governments recruited to politically appointed roles in former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department to press politically sensitive cases. Chad Mizelle, former DOJ chief of staff who acted as associate AG for a time, said DOJ recruited lawyers outside the beltway who weren’t afraid to challenge a judge if it meant making the best argument.

“You need to be able to forcibly push back against some of these judges,” said Mizelle, who appeared in court in the Perkins case. “If you don’t agree with the argument, you’re going to have a hard time doing that.”

At the Justice Department last year, Kambli was part of a legal team that defiantly defended Trump’s deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members before US District Judge James Boasberg. The team refused to provide the judge with information Boasberg said he needed to determine if the administration ignored his orders to turn planes back to the US.

Kambli said the government didn’t have to honor the judge’s oral directive, arguing it didn’t have the same force of law as a written order. “Your honor, we believe that there was no order given, because the written order is what controls,” he said at the time.

Kambli supports legal immigration and views illegal passage into the US as unfair to families like his who migrated legally, said a friend and former colleague of Kambli, who requested anonymity to freely discuss him.

His Strategy

His briefs before the appeals court reflect a pragmatic strategy aimed at getting the president a partial, if not complete, win in reviving the White House orders.

He’s arguing the sanctions imposed by the orders—revoking security clearances, scrutinizing government contracts, blocking government building access—can survive on their own if the rest of the orders are enjoined. The result could be a revival of the president’s revocation of the firms’ security clearances, which observers have said is the most likely to stand up to scrutiny.

“There’s a sense in some high-profile circles that you could put forth any argument against President Trump and win,” Wessan said. “But I don’t think anyone should take any case for granted.”

Aside from appealing the Big Law rulings, Kambli is fighting to reinstate the revocation of a security clearance for Mark Zaid, the national security lawyer who represented a whistleblower accusing Trump of extorting Ukraine for dirt on his political rival.

Kambli successfully swayed the court to expedite Zaid’s appeal and delay the law firm appeals, resulting in same-day oral arguments in a bid to maximize the chance of a win.

“I think case law is crystal clear—the president has exclusive unilateral decision-making on who gets a security clearance and he can revoke it for any reason,” Mizelle said. Arguing the Zaid case on the same day as the Big Law appeals is strategic since “it tees up what is the more straightforward issue because it’s routine application of existing precedent,” he said.

Shifting Positions

Kambli’s task has been complicated by the Justice Department’s shifting positions on the law firms case.

In early March he notified the firms’ lawyers of DOJ’s intention to drop the case and submitted a notice of voluntary dismissal. Within 24 hours, he rescinded his own dismissal and the case was back on.

The ex-DOJ lawyer, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the case, said Kambli never would have withdrawn from the case without an order from a senior department official.

“That says there was a cooler head prevailing that said this is not a case we want to be fighting,” said James Pearce, senior counsel at Washington Litigation Group, who worked on the special counsel team that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.

A Trump administration official called the dismissal “inadvertent.” The Wall Street Journal reported Trump was furious at the dismissal and ordered the about-face.