Latest news with #GibsonDunn
E&E News
5 hours ago
- Business
- E&E News
Senate confirms EPA nominee, advances Agriculture pick
The Senate voted Tuesday to confirm David Fotouhi as EPA deputy administrator while setting the stage to similarly approve Stephen Vaden to become second-in-command at the Agriculture Department. Senators confirmed Fotouhi, an industry lawyer who also served in President Donald Trump's first administration, by a 53-41 margin along party lines. They then voted 48-45 to end debate on Vaden's nomination, with the final confirmation vote scheduled for later Tuesday afternoon. Fotouhi is the third of Trump's EPA picks to secure confirmation, after Administrator Lee Zeldin and general counsel Sean Donahue. A half-dozen nominations are still pending, including those of Aaron Szabo to head the Office of Air and Radiation and Jessica Kramer to lead the Office of Water. Advertisement After serving in top jobs in EPA's Office of General Counsel during Trump's first term, Fotouhi has spent the last few years as a partner at the firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, where his client list has encompassed numerous businesses regulated by EPA, including carmakers Toyota and Mercedes-Benz and Matador Resources, an oil and gas producer, according to a financial disclosure report.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
BlackRock calls antitrust claims "unprecedented, unsound and unsupported"
(Reuters) -An attorney for BlackRock called antitrust claims by Republican-led states "unprecedented, unsound and unsupported" on Monday and said they had failed to show how the firms' involvement with industry climate groups interfered with market competition. Gibson Dunn attorney Gregg Costa spoke as BlackRock and co-defendants Vanguard and State Street seek to dismiss the claims in the closely watched antitrust case brought by Texas and 12 other states.
Bloomberg
02-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
SVP, Lenders in Advanced Talks to Extend Kloeckner's Senior Debt
Strategic Value Partners and a group of creditors of Kloeckner Pentaplast are in advanced talks to extend the maturity of the German packaging company's senior debt beyond next year as inflation and waning demand pressure its business, according to people with knowledge of the matter. As part of the discussions, the group of senior creditors have asked the US alternative investment firm —which is the controlling shareholder of the company — to inject about €300 million ($343 million) of equity into Kloeckner Pentaplast, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The creditor group is being advised by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and Houlihan Lokey Inc.
Reuters
27-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
NPR turns to Bush-era conservative, media advocate for Trump lawsuit
May 27 (Reuters) - National Public Radio has hired a pair of prominent lawyers at law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, including one-time Republican federal appeals court nominee Miguel Estrada, for its lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of illegally cutting public broadcasting funds. NPR and a group of public radio stations sued the administration in federal district court in Washington on Tuesday, accusing it of trampling their rights to speech and association under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. President Donald Trump earlier this month issued an executive order to cut federal funding for NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service. Estrada, who has argued 24 cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush in 2001 to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but Senate Democrats did not allow him to advance. He is working with Gibson Dunn's Theodore Boutrous Jr, who has represented media outlets for years in First Amendment fights. Boutrous was a lead attorney for CNN in 2018 in a lawsuit accusing the first Trump administration of unlawfully revoking a reporter's press credentials. Boutrous in a statement said Trump's executive action against NPR was "blatantly unconstitutional" and violated the rights of the organization and its member stations. The administration has accused, opens new tab NPR and the PBS of bias and called for an end to public funding of news media. In a statement, a White House spokesperson said Trump was exercising his lawful power to limit funding to NPR and PBS, which is not a plaintiff. Other Trump targets have also turned to lawyers with conservative credentials to sue the administration. William Burck, who served as a lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, is representing Harvard University in lawsuits against the administration. Former Bush-era U.S. solicitor Paul Clement is representing WilmerHale in its lawsuit challenging Trump's executive order against the law firm. Gibson Dunn is also representing, opens new tab the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and other clients in a pair of immigration-related lawsuits against the Trump administration. The case is National Public Radio Inc et al v. Trump et al, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 1:25-cv-01674. For NPR: Miguel Estrada, Theodore Boutrous Jr and Katie Townsend of Gibson Dunn For Aspen Public Radio: Steven Zansberg of Zansberg Beylkin For defendants: No appearance yet Read more: From Harvard to Musk, law firm Quinn Emanuel juggles Trump's friends and foes Law firms hire former Tesla lawyer and top conservative litigator for Trump fight Obama's top Supreme Court lawyer files lawsuit over Trump funding freeze Neal Katyal, Milbank join team suing Trump over bid to oust Democratic official
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
What Would a Conservative Superlawyer Say About His Firm Bowing to Trump?
When I read recently that the law firm Gibson Dunn had backed away from suing the Trump administration over its mass deportation policy for fear of becoming another of the president's targets, I thought back to a dinner at a judicial conference in the late spring of 2009. My dinner partner was Theodore Olson, the well-known Washington lawyer who represented George W. Bush in the decisive Supreme Court battle over Florida's votes in the 2000 election. After serving as solicitor general in Mr. Bush's first term, he returned to his law practice. His firm was Gibson Dunn. Days before the dinner, Mr. Olson and his opponent in the 2000 election case, David Boies, announced that on behalf of two gay couples, they were suing the State of California over the ban on same-sex marriage imposed by Proposition 8, which the state's voters approved the previous November. Mr. Boies, a liberal, was a free agent, the founder of the law firm that bore his name. Mr. Olson was different, a founding member of the Federalist Society, a Republican insider who personified Big Law. The lawsuit drew fire from both left and right. L.G.B.T.Q. rights advocates were intensely distrustful of Mr. Olson's motives and of the lawsuit's chances, having spent years trying to cultivate political support for same-sex marriage while keeping the issue away from courts they viewed as hostile. An account of the lawsuit's filing in The Times referred to the two lawyers as 'limelight-grabbing but otherwise untested players in the bruising battle over Proposition 8.' I was intrigued, and now here by chance was Mr. Olson, an elbow away. Why are you doing this, I asked him. What's the story? His response removed any doubt I might have had about his sincerity or his commitment to his clients. He believed in marriage, he said. (I knew that his third wife, Barbara Olson, died in one of the hijacked planes on Sept. 11 and that he had recently married for a fourth time.) He had gay friends and saw no reason the law should prevent them from marrying the people they wanted to spend their lives with. Somebody would bring such a lawsuit, he observed, and it might as well be someone with his resources and lifetime of knowledge of how the federal courts worked. He believed he had a winning case. His death last November at the age of 84, after suffering a stroke, meant that he didn't live to see how quickly a Republican president's extortion could reduce once-proud law firms to pitiable supplicants for the president's grace. As the serial capitulations mounted, with firms promising to bestow millions of dollars' worth of lawyers' time on the president's favorite causes in return for continued access to the federal government for themselves and their clients, I often thought of Mr. Olson and of how he might have responded. I know that my instinct that he would have fought back hard is presumptuous; no more than the rest of us, he could not have imagined what has unfolded, let alone formulated an anticipatory response to the unthinkable. Gibson Dunn was not among the firms targeted by Mr. Trump with executive orders that would have seriously damaged their businesses had they not acquiesced to his demands. But Gibson Dunn, two months after suing the Trump administration to restore legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children, did nonetheless stop providing help because it was fearful of the consequences. Would Mr. Olson have demanded that the law firm where he spent his entire career, aside from interruptions for government service, not abandon its previous commitment to those children out of fear of giving offense? Of course, I don't know, but I'd like to think he was savvy enough to know that those firms that decided to fight the president's astonishing overreach were likely to win. One of them was Perkins Coie, even though many of the nation's big law firms declined to sign a legal brief on its behalf. The lawsuit that he and Mr. Boies filed was not the case that led to the Supreme Court decision establishing a nationwide right to same-sex marriage. That came later, in the Obergefell case, decided in 2015. The victory in the California case was limited to marriage in that state. After Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker declared Proposition 8 unconstitutional, Gov. Jerry Brown declined to appeal. The appeal was carried forward by the group that had proposed the marriage ban. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, that the group lacked standing, a decision that had the effect of making Judge Walker's ruling the final word. As random chance would have it, I was in Mr. Olson's company again that summer when county clerks' offices in California, responding to the Supreme Court's Hollingsworth decision, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. We were two of maybe a dozen people seated around a seminar table at Duke Law School. His cellphone rang, and he took the call. When he finished talking, he turned to the group and told us that it was one of his clients reporting that he had just been married. This tough embodiment of Big Law had tears in his eyes. Soon enough, so did many of the rest of us. I don't mean to suggest that the same-sex marriage case provided an epiphany that turned him into a liberal Democrat. Far from it. In the summer of 2017, he and I were speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, a place where a favorite evening activity is for people to gather their friends and even slight acquaintances to sit on a porch for a glass of wine and an evening's conversation. Mr. Olson and I and our spouses were guests at such a gathering, most of us journalists who had known him over the years. Mr. Trump had been in office for a few months, and it appeared to most of us that things were not going well. The Muslim ban, in particular, concerned us, and we gently poked at Mr. Olson to get him to express any doubts about the new president. He kept deflecting us, and we kept trying while being careful not to cross the line into rudeness. Finally, with a tired smile, he put his hands up in surrender. 'Look, I'll put it this way,' he said. 'We got Gorsuch.' Whatever the pros and cons of Mr. Trump's first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, who took the seat that President Barack Obama intended a year earlier for Merrick Garland, it was a revealing moment. 'But Gorsuch' was to become a mantra among Republicans who had their doubts about other aspects of the Trump agenda but not about his designs on the courts. Mr. Olson's comment was a deft conversation ender; there wasn't much more to say. Yes, we all had Justice Gorsuch. And we also, for a time, had Ted Olson. I wish we still did. I think he would have something to tell us.
