French Insider Podcast Ep. 36
Back to the White House: The Next Trump Administration with Jonathan Meyer of Sheppard Mullin
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Listen to the podcast released December 3, 2024 here:
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In this episode of French Insider, Jonathan Meyer, a partner in Sheppard Mullin’s Governmental Practice Group, former General Counsel of DHS, and leader of the firm’s National Security team, joins host Valérie Demont, Sheppard Mullin’s French Desk Co-Chair, to discuss anticipated changes under the incoming Trump Administration and its potential impact on business, national security, and other key areas.
About Jonathan Meyer
Jonathan Meyer is a partner in Sheppard Mullin’s Governmental Practice Group and leader of the firm’s National Security team. He counsels clients on their interactions with federal and state government, as well as national and homeland security, Congressional oversight, cybersecurity, AI, high tech, transportation security, and more.
Jon served as the sixth General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2021 to 2024, where he led legal teams, handled Supreme Court cases, and advised on sensitive national security issues. With extensive experience in Congress and the Justice Department, Jon offers an insider perspective on government and private sector interactions.
Jon is a two-time recipient of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s Outstanding Service Medal, along with the U.S. Secret Service Director’s Honor Award, the Customs and Border Protection Commissioner’s Ensign Award, and the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant’s Distinguished Service Medal, among numerous other awards and honors.
About Valérie Demont
In the firm’s New York office, Valérie Demont is a partner in Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate Practice Group, where she focuses primarily on U.S. and cross-border mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance matters. As a leader of the firm’s French Desk team, she advises foreign companies on the establishment and growth of their operations in the United States, acting as de facto "outside general counsel" for non-U.S. companies in the United States.
Valérie has been involved in numerous mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and dispositions for corporations and private equity funds in the U.S., Europe (including France) and Asia (including India). Not only is she a frequent speaker at events focused on cross-border trade, but she is also an outside pro bono counsel to Girls Who Invest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the number of women in portfolio management and executive leadership in the asset management industry.
Transcript:
Valérie Demont:
Welcome to French Insider, the Sheppard Mullin French Desk monthly podcast dedicated to French investors and companies investing and doing business in the United States. Each episode features conversations with thought leaders and experts in various industries on the business environment and challenges in investing and successfully growing in the US. And now for the inside look.
Bonjour, and welcome to today's episode of the French Insider. I am Valérie Demont, a partner in the corporate practice of Sheppard Mullin based out of our New York office. Thank you for tuning in, and today it is my particular pleasure to receive our guest, Jonathan Meyer.
Jonathan is a partner of ours who leads our national security law team at Sheppard Mullin. He recently served as General Counsel for the US Department of Homeland Security and just rejoined us a few months ago after spending 20 years in government, including time on Capitol Hill and at the Justice Department. And it's my particular pleasure to receive Jonathan today to discuss what to expect from the new Trump administration. Jonathan, welcome.
Jonathan Meyer:
Thank you very much. Bonjour Valérie. Bonjour tout le monde. It's a pleasure to be on the French Desk podcast. I was on it back when I was here, a partner a few years back, and it's a pleasure to return and to join you, Valérie.
Valérie Demont:
Yes. And what better time to do that than just at this moment when we are welcoming a new administration to run our country for the next four years. And your insights at the Justice Department as well as the US Department of Homeland Security are going to be priceless to our listeners here.
So tell us, Jonathan, what's the Trump administration Cabinet going to look like?
Jonathan Meyer:
Well, as we speak today, the Cabinet has pretty much been completely named and I think there are a few themes we are seeing. We are seeing people who have shown themselves to be close allies and loyalists of Donald Trump and people who not surprisingly subscribe to his approach to politics and to governing.
And it has played itself out in several different ways. Some of the marquee positions are of particular note. At the Justice Department as you know, initially President-elect Trump had named Matt Gaetz. That nomination was withdrawn and now we have Pam Bondi to be Attorney General. She does have significant law enforcement and legal leadership experience. She was the Attorney General of Florida and is very much devoted to the causes that the President-elect subscribes to.
The other key leadership at the department consists largely of experienced legal hands both in the Deputy Attorney General's spot and the Solicitor General's spot, again, as is always the case, subscribing to the President-elect's philosophy.
At the Department of Homeland Security where I was most recently, the designee is Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota. What's notable there is that on the subjects that draw the most attention at DHS, which is generally immigration and the border, the shots are likely not to be called by Kristi Noem. They're likely to be called by two people at the White House: Stephen Miller, who served in the White House during Trump's first administration and is now going to be the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and has very broad discretion on immigration. And Tom Homan, the former Acting Director of ICE who has been named the Border Czar. I worked with Tom Homan during a past administration. I know him.
So the shots on DHS are going to be called out of the White House as to immigration. As to other topics, say FEMA or TSA or the Coast Guard, those will probably allow Kristi Noem more discretion.
And then let me just touch briefly on the Treasury Department because a lot of people are interested in it. Mr. Bessent has now been named as the nominee there. He's an interesting choice in that his background is not the typical background in the Trump administration. It includes having worked with George Soros in the past, but he's viewed as loyal to Donald Trump. He's a big-time investor and I think the markets are showing some relief at the fact that he is a relatively conventional candidate and is expected not to rock the boat too much.
But we will see. There is much more to come. And of course those are only a few of the people in the Cabinet. We don't have time to go through all of them.
Valérie Demont:
Absolutely. But you touched on a couple of them, and I'd be curious to hear your views as to why President-elect Trump selected these persons to lead these different departments and what does it mean, what can we expect from them starting perhaps with the Department of Justice?
Jonathan Meyer:
I think with all of them in varying degrees, it seems clear the primary criterion was a loyalty to President-elect Trump. Pam Bondi has represented him in one of his impeachments and has shown loyalty, which is not to say she's not qualified, but loyalty has been important.
And what it's going to mean particularly with regard to the Justice Department, but also at DHS, perhaps less at Treasury, is greater White House control over these departments.
Traditionally, really going back at least to Watergate some 50 years ago, the Justice Department has exercised autonomy from the White House. There have been policies that prohibited the White House from attempting to influence decisions, prosecutorial decisions and the like by the Justice Department. There is some reason to believe that may go away now, that a philosophy that the president gets to run to everything is taking hold. So I think that is an important development, particularly with regard to law enforcement, but also more generally throughout the government and the Cabinet that we are likely to see, even more so than was the case in the first Trump administration.
Valérie Demont:
So if we stay on the topic of the Department of Justice with this increased control, the White House over the department, where do we think that the Department of Justice is going to go? What focus and priorities is it going to pursue? Do we have a sense yet?
Jonathan Meyer:
Yes, I think we do. I mean we are still looking into a crystal ball, but I think that crystal ball is becoming a little clearer, and I think you can categorize what the Justice Department is likely to do into two categories. One is going to be a response to what has happened in the Justice Department for the past four years, what then-candidate Trump has repeatedly referred to as the weaponization of government and the weaponization of the Department of Justice. That is how he refers to the various prosecutions that have occurred against him and his allies and other political friends, if you will, of the President-elect.
I think we are likely to see not only a reversal of that, but we’re also already seeing an end of things like the special counsel investigation into Donald Trump. But we may well see it being turned around. The President-elect has made pretty clear he intends to fire the FBI director even though the FBI director is slated to remain in his position until 2027. But he plans to direct them to undertake certain more politically motivated law enforcement actions. So that's the one category.
The second category will be law enforcement and legal policy focused on implementing key policy priorities for the President-elect, again, which is normal for a new administration. For example, it appears that the Trump administration is going to be very favorably disposed to cryptocurrency and related issues. So we can see the Department of Justice perhaps being less focused on prosecuting allegations of fraud or what have you in the cryptocurrency markets. And we could see them perhaps trying to investigate expenses under some of the big spending bills that occurred during the Biden administration, such as fraud in expenses related to the Infrastructure Bill, or the Inflation Reduction Act.
So we're likely to see changes in priorities along those lines. We again don't have time to go into all of the topics, but those are the two broad categories I would list as changes we're likely to see substantively at the Justice Department.
Valérie Demont:
Got it. And in terms of investigating expenses, we've all heard about the creation of this new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. What do you think of that and is that going to play a role in this investigation process?
Jonathan Meyer:
So yes, for those of you who don't know, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is actually not a department but will be sort of an extra-governmental body led by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, is going to be devoted to finding inefficiencies and eliminating inefficiencies in the government.
It is quite common for presidential candidates to say that the government is bloated and there is too much spending and it needs to be cut. President-elect Trump did that as well. This is the body he's creating to try to do that, but it's going to be more than just putting on a green visor and looking for places where the government is spending too much money. They have made it clear that they're also going to look at the way that federal government employment works, what they call the Deep State. And what this will mean will be looking closely at all of the career civil service and public servant jobs in the government and looking at A) whether they are necessary and B) whether they should remain career appointments, which have a number of protections in terms of the status of those employees and the career employees serve in every administration. They don't change with the administration.
They want to look at whether many of those positions should be switched to a position that is more of an at-will position and/or a political appointment, which would change with the administration because there is a belief in the incoming Trump administration that the so-called Deep State, which is primarily career civil servants, is really biased and not neutral and serves democratic administrations more faithfully. So they want to change that.
All of that will come out of the so-called DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, it appears, and perhaps much more.
Valérie Demont:
So what does it mean for the Department of Justice? Because on the one hand we hear that there's going to be perhaps increased scrutiny of some areas of activity, for example, the expenses that you mentioned. On the other hand, there's clearly a desire to pull back a lot of regulation and to cut back on government inefficiencies as you just discussed, combined with rumors that you read about high level of attrition amongst staff at the Department of Justice. So what is this department going to look like?
Jonathan Meyer:
So it's going to be very interesting. And with regard to those rumors, I can tell you they're more than rumors. Having spent most of my career in government, I know a lot of people in government. I am receiving a lot of phone calls these days both from political appointees whom you would expect to hear from because, they're going to be out of a job on January 20th as intended, but also long time, long serving career employees of the federal government who are thinking of leaving because they are concerned about what may be coming.
So we may well see much greater turnover in the ranks of the Justice Department and other places too, such as DHS and other Cabinet departments. We may see more than we normally see because of the sea change we may be experiencing.
I say that with one huge caveat, which is that there tends to be a bit of an overreaction in situations like this. There were many people I spoke to in 2016 when Trump was elected the first time who said, "Oh, I better leave my job," and then they didn't; they hung on and then continued serving in the Biden administration. So there is often an overreaction in the immediate aftermath of an election, and we're three weeks in now, but it's still pretty much the immediate aftermath.
But that said, I think we will see more than we have in the past, and so there will be turnover. And if that happens, it will mean there will be a lot less experience in the ranks of these departments, experience that is greatly needed. But it will also mean that it will be easier for this administration to make changes in policy. They're likely to reverse a lot of policies and regulations that the Biden administration put in. Again, that is not unusual. The Biden administration reversed a lot of what the Trump administration had done, so we will see that, but there is a sense that there will be more, that it will be all of that on steroids this time just because of the nature of this administration and some of the plans they have.
Valérie Demont:
And it sounds like if things pan out as you expect them to, we should see a decrease in enforcement simply because there will just not be enough people with experience to pursue efficient enforcement it sounds like. Maybe I'm wrong, but love to hear your thoughts.
Jonathan Meyer:
To some extent, but a huge caveat is there will definitely be some areas where we will see greater enforcement. I could see more of an emphasis on going after, for example, green industries and clean energy, sectors that the Trump administration does not view as their friends.
Certainly going after what the Trump administration refers to as the woke culture and DEI and trans rights is possible. These are all things that a prosecutor of a certain mindset could look to investigate as violations of the law or regulations, violations of equal protection or what have you.
So yes, a less experienced law enforcement community is almost by definition less effective and less efficient, but if it is focused on new or different areas, that doesn't mean there will be less enforcement in those areas. It could be more.
Valérie Demont:
Switching gears to the Department of Homeland Security on the national security front, what is your take? What's going to happen with this new leadership?
Jonathan Meyer:
So with regard to DHS specifically, obviously there will be a huge change in the approach to immigration, both legal and illegal immigration and southwest border crossings. The President-elect has promised quite publicly to deport every illegal immigrant in the country. That is not likely to happen because it is logistically impossible, but I think he will be more enforcement minded. Also, and this I assume is quite relevant to a number of our French and other international listeners, he is likely as he has in the past to limit legal immigration, often not by taking legal action to change the rules, but by simply starving the parts of the government, in particular USCIS, that process those visa applications and therefore they won't be processed as fast, and the volume will go down. So I think we can expect that.
More broadly in terms of national security, we will continue to see a growing emphasis on national security that has been growing for quite some time now in administrations of Democratic and Republican presidents. The focus may change a bit. If past is prologue, we may see less of a focus on national security threats from Russia and less of an attempt to assist Ukraine in its defense against Russia. We will continue to see strong concerns about China, which we've seen in the Biden administration, and if anything will increase in the Trump administration with good reason. There are a lot of valid national security concerns about what China is doing and intends to do.
There also has been and will be a strong focus on Iran. There is no love lost between the Trump administration and Iran. And again, it's not like the Biden administration was holding hands and singing Kumbaya with Iran, but t's likely to be even more so with the Trump administration.
So all of these things will be issues and will play out in various fields, be it how we deal with NATO, how we give scrutiny to foreign investment in the United States, outbound investment from the United States and other countries and the like.
Valérie Demont:
So you've touched on a number of points here. Just briefly on immigration and for the benefit of our listeners, we will have a full podcast dedicated to this topic because it's really important and there's been a lot of talk around immigration during the campaign, but just for listeners who are focused on, and particularly corporates who are focused on bringing workers, qualified workers into the United States to service their operations there, there's been a lot of criticism around the quota system with the H-1B Visa for example. Are you expecting that some of that will get better under Trump administration in light of his stand of supporting the growth of businesses in the country?
Jonathan Meyer:
He stands for supporting the growth of businesses in the country, but I believe he's on record as being critical of the H-1B program and other visas. I don't think they will come to a halt because again, they are critical to the economy, but because he will be so focused on stemming illegal immigration, he is likely to take resources that might have been used for legal immigration and divert them to efforts on the southwest border. That's the first point.
Second point is as much as he is a businessman and focused on the American economy, he's also very focused on protecting American workers from what he views as foreign competition. So I think he is suspicious of the H-1B program and other programs to bring foreign workers into the United States. Whether he takes legal action to stop it or simply sets priorities that make it much harder to process those visas, I would expect that we will see a more difficult time for people trying to enter the country under these types of visas.
Valérie Demont:
More on that in our next French Insider episode.
Switching to national security, you talked about China, you talked about Russia, Iran. And for the benefit of our listeners, we will have a full podcast around tariffs. So we'll not cover this now, but what should we be expecting in terms of the US and its relations with NATO, for example, and some of the other international treaties that the US are parties to? Is President Trump going to keep true to his campaign promises here?
Jonathan Meyer:
We saw in his first administration that he was quite skeptical of and critical of NATO and pushed very hard for other members of NATO to increase their financial contributions to the joint efforts of NATO.
There's an argument to be made that he was not actually as negative on NATO as he at times made it seem, but that he was doing it as a negotiating point to get those countries to contribute more. And I think there's every reason to believe he will do the same thing again this time.
There is of course an isolationist element to his philosophy which runs contrary to NATO, and I think that is still there and certainly on the margins we are likely to see America become more isolationist, less interested in engaging overseas, or devoting resources overseas. But if I had to predict, I would predict that NATO will not fall, there will just be increased pressure on NATO and NATO members to participate more and shoulder more of the burden.
Similar thing I think is likely to happen with trade, particularly with our neighbors. Again, I don't want to get into tariffs because I know there's a different podcast on that with my partner Reid Whitten who's an expert on it. But we saw last time around that Trump used various points of leverage in negotiations to renegotiate, to eliminate NAFTA, and then come out with the USMCA, the new trade deal in North America. I think we are likely to see something like that happen again this time around. So we can expect threats of all sorts of actions including tariffs, but perhaps not execution of them, at least in the way he threatens, assuming he gets some concessions from those countries.
Valérie Demont:
So only our listeners here should be quite familiar with CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. This is the regulatory body that scrutinizes investments by foreign companies into areas of strategic and national security interests and being broadly defined.
Jonathan, curious to hear your take on what the new CFIUS might look like. Can we expect tightening of the review here for foreign investments and are countries going to be dealt with separately with more focus on Chinese investments and less perhaps on allied countries investments? What's your take here?
Jonathan Meyer:
If anyone has been following, you've seen that over the last few years in the Biden administration, CFIUS has gotten much more active, particularly with regard to China. And I should point out, CFIUS is one of several processes that exist relating to inbound investment. There's also Team Telecom and the more recent ICTS, which is focused on technology. And all of those have become more active.
I fully expect that to continue. This is one area of continuity, in the sense of continuing acceleration. There's a great concern about what China is trying to do both through investments and in other ways, and so I think the scrutiny will continue. As General Counsel of DHS, I oversaw the attorneys handling CFIUS at DHS. DHS is one of the committee members of CFIUS. So there's no question in my mind that this will continue and will accelerate.
I spent a lot of time speaking to the leader of CFIUS for the US government who's at the Treasury Department. This is for the Biden administration, so he will not be continuing on, but I have every reason to believe those themes will continue and accelerate.
And then the other thing is the advent of more scrutiny on outbound investment. The Biden administration recently issued new regulations and guidance about when American companies are investing abroad, again, in particular with regard to China and in particular with sensitive products and technologies like microchips, quantum computing and AI. And I think that is going to continue as well.
That is with good reason. I think there are very valid national security reasons to be concerned about that, and for the government to give scrutiny to some transactions where there is discretion is exactly what to do about it. And I think this administration will be pretty enforcement minded in that area. So that is going to be an active area over the next four years, particularly with regard to China. Not only China, but that's the big one.
Valérie Demont:
Is it primarily focused on chips or does this go beyond that?
Jonathan Meyer:
It goes beyond that. There is a lot of concern about, for example, foreign entities using investments in US companies just to spy on what the United States is doing in its defense industries, in the military and the like. So it's quite, quite broad. Chips get a lot of the attention, but that is only one small part of it.
Another thing that has affected international trade, particularly with China, that the Biden administration has been active on has been the issue of forced labor in China. And both executive actions by the Biden administration, but also a law passed by Congress that prohibits American companies from importing products or components that are the result of forced labor in China and the Customs and Border Protection enforces that and there's been a lot of work on that. It'll be interesting to see whether that continues. My guess is it will, again, because of the concern about China that pervades both administrations.
Valérie Demont:
So you mentioned Congress and one of your expertise is really in congressional investigations. Congress is Republican controlled at this point. So what do we think Congress is going to be looking at? What do you expect to happen in the area of congressional investigations? Any thoughts there?
Jonathan Meyer:
Yes, absolutely. I've spent most of my career either conducting or responding to congressional investigations, and we are at an unusual juncture because usually when the White House flips, one of the houses of Congress is in the hands of the opposition party. And so the major preoccupation of the Hill, at least that chamber of the Hill is the administration and trying to hold it to account.
We are not in that situation today. As you know, the House, the Senate and the White House are all going to be in the hands of the Republicans. So the question that a lot of people have been raising is, "Okay, well what is Congress going to look into if they're not going to be looking into what the administration is doing?" And there are several answers to that.
I think it falls again into two categories. The first is they're going to be looking into what the Biden administration did in the past that goes hand in hand with what we were discussing with the Justice Department, where they're going to look at what they believe to have been a weaponization of government by the Biden administration. And so I would expect to see many former Biden administration officials to be called up.
And related to that, it's been announced that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to chair a subcommittee, which is essentially going to be the congressional version of the DOGE, which we discussed earlier, the Department of Government Efficiency. She intends to hold hearings about inefficiency in government and/or allegations of misbehavior by government employees. So we will see that. That is all one category.
I think the other place we are likely to see congressional investigations, and more than normal because they don't have an administration that they're investigating, will be the private sector. I would expect the Republicans who control both the Senate and the House to investigate industries and areas of the economy that they feel are misbehaving, or taking advantage of the American taxpayer, or simply acting in ways that they don't think the American people support.
This gets back to things like DEI, trans rights and the like, but it's also going to be areas of the economy that they don't favor. Again, off the top of my head, I would say clean energy may be one, industries that got a lot of support from the Biden administration and the like.
So I do think companies should be aware that there is a greater likelihood of facing congressional scrutiny over the next four years than there has been in the past number of years since all three parts of the executive and legislative branches were held by one party, and it's been a while since that happened.
Valérie Demont:
Well then, they will know who to call.
Jonathan Meyer:
Well, I am available. You can find me on the web. And look, there are plenty of people around who know how to handle congressional investigations, but it is an important thing. A lot of times people think it's like a normal investigation ... By normal I mean an executive branch investigation. It's not. A congressional investigation is a very different animal, and you need to treat it differently. So folks should be prepared to deal with that when it comes their way.
Valérie Demont:
Particularly if, as you mentioned, the committee is led by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Jonathan Meyer:
Yes. She will be chairing a subcommittee and her allies will be chairing all of the committees in the House and the Senate. There are a number of oversight committees in both chambers, both general oversight and then specific to particular issues. As you know, Members of Congress often like to make their reputations by conducting investigations. It is one of the tools they have to gain attention, and so it then becomes just a question of where they're going to go with it. And as I say, I think those two categories are where they're likely to head.
Valérie Demont:
Well, that's a wonderful wrap to our session. I cannot thank you enough, Jonathan for your time, your insights. They're really valuable. I'm really delighted that you joined us back. It's perfect timing here.
And I want to thank all of our listeners to turning into this episode of the French Insider. We are planning a series of podcasts around what to expect from this new administration. The next one will be on tariffs, and we look forward to your questions, insights, and any suggestions you may have for future episodes. Again, Jonathan, thank you very much.
Jonathan Meyer:
Thank you. It was a pleasure to be with you as always, Valérie.
Valérie Demont:
This podcast is recorded monthly and available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Amazon Music, as well as on our website, sheppardfrenchdesk.com. We want to help you and welcome your feedback and suggestions of topics.
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