The law professor and MSNBC analyst at the heart of President Donald Trump’s latest attack on the legal profession is a former mob boss prosecutor who once said he considers the president’s insults a “badge of honor.”
Andrew Weissmann has been in Trump’s crosshairs since at least 2018, when he served as lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel’s office investigating Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Now, Trump is trying to exact his revenge with executive orders stripping Weissmann of his security clearance and targeting Jenner & Block, the big-law firm that Weissmann joined as a partner in between public service jobs.
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The Jenner & Block order specifically blasts the firm for rehiring Weissmann after the Mueller investigated wrapped up. It aims to suspend security clearances and government contracts related to the firm and limit its attorneys’ entry to federal buildings—even though Weissmann doesn’t work there anymore.
“The numerous reports of Weissmann’s dishonesty, including pursuit of nonexistent crimes, bribery to foreign nationals, and overt demand that the federal government pursue a political agenda against me, is a concerning indictment of Jenner’s values and priorities,” Trump wrote in his order.
At the White House Tuesday, Trump griped that Weismann was a “bad guy.”
In fact, Weissman was a federal prosecutor for 15 years in the Eastern District of New York, where he prosecuted organized crime bosses—including members of the Gambino, Colombo and Genovese families, according to his New York University Law bio.
He was appointed to a task force supervising prosecutions related to Enron’s collapse before joining Jenner & Block as a partner from 2006 to 2011. He then served as general counsel for the FBI, chief of the fraud section at the Department of Justice, and finally as lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel’s office.
In Dec. 2018, Trump took to social media to complain about “Weissman’s [sic] horrible and vicious prosecutorial past.” He “wrongly destroyed people lives, took down great companies,” Trump wrote.
After the Mueller investigation, Weissmann returned to Jenner & Block in 2020 as co-chairman of the firm’s investigations, compliance and defense practice.
“I am thrilled to welcome back my friend and colleague,” the firm’s co-managing partner Katya Jestin said in a press release at the time. The fact that the firm not only brought back Weissmann but was “thrilled” to do so was one of the grievances listed in Trump’s executive order.
In the meantime, Weissmann had joined MSNBC as an analyst in 2019. In 2021, he left private practice to teach at New York University, and when Trump was indicted on criminal charges two years later, he started a podcast called “Prosecuting Donald Trump.” It has since been renamed “Main Justice.”
He also wrote a bestselling book in 2023 called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation about his time working for the special counsel’s office.
Trump has responded by repeatedly called Weissmann a “slimeball.” In 2024, he also made the bizarre claim that special counsel Jack Smith—who was prosecuting Trump for his role in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots—was really working for Weissmann as opposed to former Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The former prosecutor said he considered it a “badge of honor” to be singled out by Trump.
As of Wednesday, he hadn’t commented on Trump’s attempts to get back at him by targeting Jenner & Block.
But discussing Paul Weiss—another firm that Trump has targeted with an executive order—he linked to the executive order stripping away his security clearance and said he “knows what it feels like when the immense power of the presidency is used to harass and intimidate.”
“The right response is not appeasement of silence—especially when the executive is unconstitutional as violative of the First Amendment,” he wrote in a piece for Just Security. “Capitulation serves as a clarion call to further such improper action by this administration, and a permission structure to other firms to follow this path of least resistance.
