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Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world, has developed a mutually beneficial relationship with President Donald Trump — rankling some of the firm’s top talent in the process.
The elite firm represents Trump in a variety of his personal legal matters, including an appeal of his criminal conviction on 34 counts of business fraud in the Manhattan hush money case, his effort to move that case to federal court and his appeal of a New York state civil fraud verdict.
And Trump has rewarded its partners handsomely. Jay Clayton, who had a more than 20-year career at Sullivan & Cromwell, is Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence. While Clayton awaits a confirmation hearing, he remains the Manhattan U.S. attorney, one of the most powerful prosecutorial roles in the country.
Trump nominated Matthew Schwartz, one of his lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell, to be a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Schwartz’s confirmation is pending.
And Trump has tapped James McDonald, another Sullivan & Cromwell partner on Trump’s legal team, to replace Clayton as Manhattan U.S. attorney. McDonald is slated to join the office first as deputy U.S. attorney, where he is expected to assume day-to-day leadership while Clayton turns to confirmation matters.
The relationship stems from Trump’s friendship with the firm’s co-chair Robert Giuffra Jr. People familiar with the matter say he has encouraged the firm’s alliance with Trump. Giuffra, who is also a member of the president’s legal team, was among those considered by Trump for the job of attorney general after he was elected to a second term.
The firm’s relationship is starkly different from the president’s past experience with the white-shoe legal community. When Trump first hired Todd Blanche to represent him in the Manhattan hush money case in 2023, Blanche was forced to resign from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the elite law firm where he had been a partner, telling colleagues he “obviously” couldn’t take Trump as a client while remaining at the firm.
Inside Sullivan & Cromwell, some partners have bristled at the firm’s coziness with Trump. One longtime partner, Karen Seymour, well-known for having prosecuted Martha Stewart earlier in her career, accelerated her planned departure from the firm as a result of her discomfort with its Trump work. She left the firm in April 2025, according to her LinkedIn page, about three months after it took on the president as a client.
Seymour and her husband, also a longtime Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer who left the firm in 2021, are close friends with James Comey, the former FBI director and Trump foe who is facing his second prosecution by the Trump administration, and Dan Richman, a Comey ally and Columbia Law School professor.
Seymour didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other partners have opposed the firm’s work on Trump’s appeal of a jury verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit. That internal rift was first reported by the Wall Street Journal .
“There’s a general sense that the firm has sort of bought into Trumpworld,” said a person familiar with the firm’s work, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “There’s very much a sense — of the people who don’t like it — that these decisions are being made that are short-term decisions. They’re not the right thing to do from an ethical standpoint, and I think the more thoughtful people start to worry: Eventually, does this all catch up with you?”
A spokesman for the firm said its decision to represent Trump “was undertaken following thorough discussion with our firm’s nearly 200 partners, and deliberation at our Managing Partners Committee and Management Committee.”
“As with all of our client representations,” the spokesman added, “we do not publicly discuss confidential matters involving our representation of the President.”
The firm’s proximity to Trump has not been lost on those hoping to gain an edge with the Justice Department. CBS News reported that McDonald was one of the lawyers involved in convincing the department to drop a criminal investigation of Southern Coal, a mining company run by the son of Republican Sen. Jim Justice.
McDonald has also represented Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., and Polymarket, two companies that have tangled with the Justice Department.
And last summer, lawyers from the firm, including Giuffra and McDonald, began representing Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who was facing bribery charges.
Giuffra met with Justice Department officials to attempt to persuade them to take the highly unusual step of dropping the charges, according to court filings, with Trent McCotter, a top department official, later saying “it would have been entirely fair” for Giuffra, “perhaps the most respected and experienced securities attorney in the country,” to have mentioned potential investments in the United States as part of his pitch.
In May, officials said they would drop the charges. But they have met resistance from the federal judge overseeing the case, who on Wednesday balked at what he described as McCotter’s admission of “the specter of a possible agreement (involving one or multiple Defendants) in connection with the dismissal of the Indictment.”
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