Raskin, Blumenthal and Schiff Rebuke Kirkland & Ellis for Withholding Details of $125 Million Trump DealLawmakers Reject Kirkland’s Excuses for Stonewalling Investigation and Demand Immediate Compliance

Lawmakers Reject Kirkland’s Excuses for Stonewalling Investigation and Demand Immediate Compliance

Washington, D.C. (October 16, 2026)—Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee; Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Ranking Member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; and Sen. Adam Schiff wrote to the Chairman of the law firm Kirkland & Ellis Jon Ballis, rejecting the firm’s bogus legal justifications for refusing to cooperate with the Committees’ investigation into Kirkland’s decision to provide President Trump with $125 million in free legal services that align with his political agenda.

“To date, Kirkland has not cooperated with our legitimate oversight requests. Your firm has failed to produce a single responsive document and has refused to meet with Congressional staff. Instead, Kirkland has devoted its time to compiling a laundry list of legally specious claims of privilege. Notwithstanding Kirkland’s lack of cooperation, we will use every tool at our disposal to pursue this investigation—in this Congress and the next,” wrote the lawmakers.

Kirkland has failed to produce any written agreement memorializing its $125 million deal with the Trump Administration beyond President Trump’s Truth Social posts. Absent another written agreement, Trump appears to be the sole arbiter of Kirkland’s legal obligations under the deal. As the lawmakers point out, Kirkland’s professional judgment is necessarily compromised when it is under constant threat of being deemed in violation of its personal agreement with the famously vindictive President.

To resist congressional oversight, Kirkland has provided a litany of vague, contradictory and legally unsound privilege claims that are not supported by legal precedent. The lawmakers reject each of these sham claims in detail. Requests for client identities, hours worked and the value of services do not implicate attorney-client privilege. The firm’s attempt to extend executive privilege to dealings with Trump’s personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, is unsupported by legal precedent. Its settlement privilege claim is similarly flawed; Kirkland faced no executive order when it entered negotiations, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) acknowledged in federal court that its requests constituted informal information gathering, not an investigation. 

The lawmakers are renewing their demands for records and answers concerning Kirkland’s negotiations with the Administration, communications with the President’s personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, free legal work for federal agencies, potential conflicts with existing clients and efforts to poach attorneys and clients from Paul Weiss while it faced Trump’s retaliatory executive order. They also seek an itemized response to outstanding questions, a detailed log supporting any privilege claims and written confirmation that Kirkland is preserving relevant records, including encrypted or disappearing-message communications.

The inquiry continues an investigation Raskin and Blumenthal launched in April 2025 into Trump’s coercion of major law firms and the deals firms struck to avoid retaliation. Joined by Schiff, they subsequently scrutinized firms’ free legal work for the Commerce Department, sought records of Epshteyn’s role in Kirkland’s deal and pressed Skadden over potential conflicts involving its work for Intel and the Commerce Department.

Click here to read the letter.