Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The legal industry has sold its soul to deep-pocketed corporations and polarizing politicians, according to this impassioned indictment of international law firm Jones Day and its peers. New York Times reporter Enrich (Dark Towers) deplores Jones Day's role in defeating lawsuits against tobacco company R.J. Reynolds and defending Abbott Laboratories from a claim that bacterial contamination in its Similac infant formula caused meningitis and brain damage in a newborn. He also rehashes the firm's entanglement with Donald Trump: Jones Day alumnus Don McGahn became Trump's White House counsel, vetting all judicial appointments; other alumni in the Justice Department tried to quash federal investigations into the opioid-selling practices of Jones Day client Walmart; and the firm represented Trump in lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. Enrich's history of Jones Day probes the corrosion of ethics after the advent of law firm ads in the 1970s touched off a spiral of money-grubbing, and sketches engrossing vignettes of the predatory culture that resulted. Enrich's condemnations of corporations and their lawyers aren't always ironclad--he brushes aside testing results that found no contamination in Abbott's formula--but he delivers a vivid, crackling account of the law at its most bullying. Readers will be outraged. Agent: Dan Mandel, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Sept.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Why isn't Donald Trump in prison? Perhaps because he has one of the country's foremost law firms at his back. Longtime Trump-watcher Enrich, the New York Times business investigations editor and author of Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, moves from finance to law in this account of Jones Day, a legal firm that expanded in D.C. over the last few decades in order to weave itself into "the fabric of the capital's conservative firmament." Founded in the 1890s in Cleveland, the company had always been conservative. However, under the guidance of principal Steve Brogan, it has turned increasingly hard right, "a champion of right-wing politics, organizing legal challenges to Obama's health care program, white-collar prosecutions, government regulations, and voting rights laws." Much of this turn involved Don McGahn, who was Trump's in-house counsel for a couple of years until falling out over the Mueller Report. McGahn and his mentor, Ben Ginsberg, had not expected Trump to win, and they believed that Trump would convert his campaign into "an influence-buying PAC" that Jones Day would manage. "More than five years later," when Trump lost decisively in the 2020 election, "the PACs were all that was left, and Jones Day was their law firm," still exercising tremendous influence over Republican politics. The firm bought into Trump's claims of electoral fraud, though not without some internal dissent. As the author shows, Jones Day--which had previously represented massive pharmaceutical and tobacco companies and the sex scandal--ridden Catholic Church--was vigorous in "trying to stop votes from being counted--not because they thought there was something improper underway (there was zero evidence of that), but because they detected an opportunity to use the law to give their side a political edge." There are plenty of other shameful episodes, and Enrich is unblinking in reporting them, yielding a fast-moving, damning book. Essential reading for students of the Trump corruption machine. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
