Welcome back to Trump Watch. The job of a White House counsel is never easy, and if anything, this week's headlines made that more apparent. What advice does Washington's legal community have for Pat Cipollone, who will soon assume that role? We have the answer (like perhaps keeping your resume up-to-date), and more below …

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Advice for Pat

Get your ethics shop up and running. Keep Emmet Flood close by. Oh, and remember to polish off your resume, just in case…

That's what Washington's top lawyers would advise incoming White House counsel Pat Cipollone. When the litigator, currently a name partner at Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner, takes over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he'll likely be greeted with a number of big issues stacked on his plate.

We asked lawyers who have worked inside the White House, or had experience representing presidents, for advice. Here's what they said:

>> Kirkland & Ellis' Neil Eggleston, former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, urged Cipollone to take care in filling the office's ranks, highlighting some of the deputy-level vacancies at the White House. “[N]o matter how good a lawyer he is, there will be areas of expertise he doesn't have experience with. He's got to make sure he has the best possible people around him,” Eggleston said, noting Cipollone will likely fill those spots when he formally joins.

Eggleston, who was also an associate counsel in the Bill Clinton White House, said Cipollone might keep Emmet Flood, who currently serves as acting counsel. Flood, whom Eggleston described as “excellent,” left the firm Williams & Connolly this year, joining the White House to oversee its response to special counsel Robert Mueller III's investigation.

Eggleston also highlighted oversight and ethics issues. “If Democrats take back the House, there's certainly going to be attention to oversight,” he said, joining the chorus of Washington, D.C., lawyers who are keeping a close eye on the Nov. 6 results.

The White House's top ethics cop, Stefan Passantino, recently left the administration and joined Michael Best. Eggleston said finding a new ethics official should be a top priority. Not many private lawyers work in public ethics, he said, “so finding that person is a difficult process.”

Lastly, Eggleston said, “(Cipollone) needs a really strong policy person, because this president has ideas about the Constitution and things he can do… but he's entitled to the best legal advice.”

>> Gibson Dunn partner Helgi Walker, previously a lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, emails in: “The best advice that I, as an alum of the White House Counsel's Office, could give Pat is something he already knows but bears repeating: always keep in mind that you are there to serve the American people, whose goodness, fairness, and common sense is unfailing. That's the lodestar.”

>> We asked Schertler & Onorato's Robert Bennett what a possible Democratic takeover in the U.S. House of Representatives would mean. “We don't know if the Democrats will win, which is not certain,” he said. If they did, “they'd need to use their time to issue subpoenas and hold hearings. They better be prepared for those.”

Bennett, who knows a thing or two about working with presidents after representing Bill Clinton, also served up some advice (and perhaps levity) on how to work with Trump: “I'd tell him that he should play it straight, give the president his honest advice and opinion, and that's his job. I suppose given the past history, also have his resume (ready) for a new job.”

>> With the topic of birthright citizenship at the top of people's minds, we'll also point you to this Lawfare Blog piece by Bob Bauer. Bauer, who also once headed the Obama White House's legal shop, wrote in part of the president's apparent position on birthright citizenship: “The institutional responsibility for dissuading the president from this course falls largely on the White House counsel, as it does to some extent in almost every administration—but perhaps more so in this one, in which the president has effectively declared war on his own Department of Justice … It is particularly in the light of the travel ban experience that his counsel must contend with and advise the grave institutional costs of this latest initiative. This is a large part of what it means for a White Counsel to represent the presidency, not just the person—and personal politics—of the president.”

He continues: “A president may decide to still take the shot and damn the consequences. As an institutional matter, White House counsels should lead the internal resistance and, if necessary, offer options that would enable their principals to express constitutional views, or accomplish political goals, short of taking grotesquely irresponsible and doomed legal initiatives.”

This Week in Trump Watch

>> A federal judge in Maryland on Friday denied the Trump administration's bid to stop an emoluments lawsuit from proceeding to discovery pending appeal. The suit was brought by state attorneys general in D.C. and Maryland. Read Judge Peter Messitte's ruling here.

>> Neomi Rao, the White House regulatory czar who is being considered for a D.C. Circuit vacancy, lauded the Trump administration's deregulation efforts on Thursday, my colleague C. Ryan Barber reports. Rao was speaking at the American Bar Association's Administrative Law Conference here in Washington, D.C.—just days after Axios first reported that Trump has personally interviewed Rao to fill Justice Brett Kavanaugh's now-vacant seat on the Washington, D.C., federal appeals court.

>> Dozens of companies—tech giants, financial institutions, and more—are pushing back against recent attempts by the Trump administration to reduce protections for transgender people under federal civil rights laws, the National Law Journal's Erin Mulvaney writes.

>> A three-judge panel in the Second Circuit is weighing a bid by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to resuscitate its emoluments lawsuit against the president, after lawyers for the watchdog group and the Justice Department duked it out during oral arguments Tuesday. A lower court judge in New York had tossed the suit after finding the group did not have standing to sue. Gupta Wessler's Deepak Gupta argued Tuesday on behalf of CREW, while DOJ Civil Division lawyer and ex-Jones Day partner Hashim Mooppan represented the Trump administration. You can listen to Tuesday'sarguments here.

>> A class action lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court this week, claiming Trump and his children have promoted scam products and services for years to unsophisticated investors, while they lined their pockets in profits from the companies whose products they promoted. Roberta Kaplan of Kaplan Hecker & Fink and Andrew Celli of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady are representing the plaintiffs in the suit, filed in the Southern District of New York. My colleague Colby Hamilton has more.

 

Thanks for checking out our Gavel Tracker! How do we count up these numbers? The count on Article III pending nominations is the sum of all of Trump's nominees to Article III courts, including the U.S. Court of International Trade. Our court-by-court breakdown, however, only looks at Supreme Court, appellate, and district court nominees. Additionally: Our figure for pending nominations includes nominations for future vacancies, as well as existing vacancies.

Thanks for reading Trump Watch. I will be back with more legal news on the White House next week.