Judge Emphasizes WilmerHale Order Covers All Federal Agencies

A federal judge on Thursday granted WilmerHale’s request to expand his order nullifying a presidential directive targeting the firm to explicitly cover the entire US government.

The amended order ends a back-and-forth between the law firm and the government over what federal agencies were impacted by the May 27 order that ruled Donald Trump’s executive order, which had revoked federal security clearances for its lawyers, was unconstitutional.

The law firm had said the government refused to notify a group of unnamed agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that the executive order had been nullified. It included a seemingly exhaustive list of federal agencies that it wanted US District Judge Richard Leon to include in an amended order.

The government’s position, WilmerHale argued, put it at risk of being harmed by agencies who weren’t told the executive order had been overruled.

“The Court must amend its Order to ensure that no federal agencies or officers are misguidedly enforcing the null and void WilmerHale Order,” Leon wrote on Thursday.

A spokesperson for WilmerHale did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump in March issued the executive order against WilmerHale, limiting its ability to appear before federal agencies, as retribution for the firm hiring Robert Mueller, who led a probe into the 2016 Trump campaign’s alleged coordination with Russian state officials.

The government had argued that WilmerHale was seeking to wrongly add more parties to the lawsuit after it won the permanent injunction against the order.

“It is insufficient to simply name new parties,” Richard Lawson, a deputy associate general counsel at the Department of Justice, wrote.

The DOJ has so far lost all the court cases brought by law firms who were hit with punitive executive orders. Perkins Coie was the first to win a permanent ban against the order, and the government has yet to appeal the ruling. Susman Godfrey is awaiting a ruling on a request for summary judgment, which could end the current district court litigation over the orders.

The case is: Wilmer Cutler Picker Hale and Dorr LLP v. Executive Office of the President, D.D.C., 1:25-cv-00917, 6/26/25.