Fordham Law Review Volume 87 Issue 5 Article 6 2019 Legal Dilemmas Facing White House Counsel in the Trump Administration: The Costs of Public Disclosure of FISA Requests Peter Margulies Roger Williams University School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons Recommended Citation Peter Margulies, Legal Dilemmas Facing White House Counsel in the Trump Administration: The Costs of Public Disclosure of FISA Requests, 87 Fordham L. Rev. 1913 (2019). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol87/iss5/6 This Colloquium is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. LEGAL DILEMMAS FACING WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: THE COSTS OF PUBLIC DISCLOSURE OF FISA REQUESTS Peter Margulies* INTRODUCTION Not every presidential administration can forge a new brand of government lawyering. Historically, government lawyering has swung between two poles: (1) dialogic lawyering, which stresses reasoned elaboration, respect for institutions, and continuity with unwritten norms embodied in past practice; and (2) insular lawyering, which entails opaque definitions, disregard of other institutions, and departures from unwritten norms.1 Because President Trump regularly signals his disdain for institutions, such as the intelligence community, and unwritten norms, such as prosecutorial independence,2 senior lawyers in the White House have added a new mode of legal representation that entails ad hoc adjustments to President Trump’s mercurial decisions and triage among the presidential decisions they will try to temper.