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ORAL HISTORY OF THOMAS C. GREEN
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of the Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is Judy Feigin and the interviewee
is Thomas C. Green. The interview is taking place by zoom on September 27, 2025. Tom is at
his weekend home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Judy is at her home in Washington, D.C.
This is the tenth interview.
MS. FEIGIN: Welcome.
MR. GREEN: Good morning, my dear friend.
MS. FEIGIN: For anyone who’s been reading your oral history chronologically, when
they got to the end of the last session they would have thought it was over.
So they may be surprised to see there is yet another session, but I
requested this because since we ended you have opened up a new chapter,
and it’s important. I think it should be part of this history even though we
can’t tell the whole story yet because it’s too early, but at least people
should know this is happening and they can follow up. So Tom tell us the
big news in your life professionally.
MR. GREEN: What happened is I went a little crazy [laughter]. After Mr. Trump was
reelected, just reading the papers and watching the news and seeing how
he was exercising his presumed prerogatives in office was very
disappointing to me. And worse than that, it was horribly upsetting
because so many people were being hurt and injured and disadvantaged
who did not deserve any treatment like that. And of course things have
gotten, in my view, considerably worse over time, to where we have kind
of a runaway administration here with respect to its claim to power and
prerogatives and unbridled executive capability. I can’t tell you how
disconcerting it is.
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Anyway, having absorbed enough of this, I felt I had to try to do
something, notwithstanding the fact that I was retired and enjoying my
retirement. And so I started vocalizing with some close friends my
concerns and my desire to try to find something that I or we could do
collectively to help ameliorate things. I had no idea what we would do.
Among those I spoke with are your good friend John Aldock and Barry
Levine. And the reaction I got was kind of, on the one hand, gee, all that
sounds cool and great. And on the other hand, we’re all in our 80s, are you
nuts to try to do something like this? And I said I think we can pull this
off. What I was alluding to was actually to start a small law firm.
The thing that made it opportunistic in the moment was there were
just huge numbers of lawyers being terminated at the Department of
Justice, being pushed out of the DOJ, being pushed out of U.S. Attorney’s
offices. And then we got into that phase where many of the big law firms
were making agreements with Trump, which were unholy and hard to
comprehend. And so there were lots of younger lawyers in these firms
who were disillusioned. And there was just an enormous amount of
talented and skillful and motivated individuals who wanted to try to do
something. And so there was an opportunity there to try to grab a few of
them. And so that’s what I did.
I said we really need to get a larger group here to put this together.
We’ve got to reach out and get ourselves a steering committee. We need to
form a corporation. So we went on to do that. We organized as the
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Washington Law Firm, and then were told by the D.C. government they
made a mistake because there is already an entity by that name. So we
became the Washington Litigation Group. We are a non-profit public
welfare law firm organized in the District of Columbia and have now been
granted 501(c)(3) status to do essentially charitable work, which is
roughly defined as representing those who have been disadvantaged by
actions of the administration and who have meritorious claims and who
are unable to defray the cost of representation.
The model is simply that we exist by virtue of donations. The
donations are used to defray principally the salaries of the lawyers whom
we have hired and continue to hire, and the costs of running our operation.
Those on the committee serve without compensation. We now have nine
members on the steering committee, and they’re all very extraordinary
individuals and prominent lawyers. Retired, but many of them are doing a
lot of things. For instance, Judge John Mott, while he’s retired from the
court, is now a well-known mediator. They’re doing their own things,
many of them. And now I think we’re up to five lawyers and we get
knocks on the door every day. Can I come and volunteer? Can I join you?
We are probably in about 10 cases right now, across the board on various
issues. But I’ll tell you something. It was hard enough to create a law firm,
but it’s even harder in one sense to find the cases that can be impactful.
Because the whole idea here is to try to promote the rule of law and find
cases that will accomplish that.
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And we’re not getting any help from the Supreme Court, which is
kind of eroding the underpinning of a number of possible claims. They
don’t seem interested at this moment in putting any real restraints on
executive power. And we’ve got issues of standing and this and that. So
we’re in there, doing what we can.
I think it’s good that we’re there, but it’s challenging. It’s not
challenging to find the donations. It’s not challenging really to find
lawyers to do the work. It’s challenging really to find the impactful cases.
There are thousands and thousands of government employees out of work.
First of all, you can’t represent them all. Secondly, we’re not an
employment law firm. And third, 99% of them, sadly, don’t have a claim
because they’re employees at-will. That’s just one little segment of all of
this.
So that’s what we’re doing. We’ve got an office downtown. We’re
washingtonlitigationgroup.org. And anyone reading this who is inspired,
please feel free to check the website. And that’s what I’m doing. So far,
it’s taking a lot of time. We hired an office manager a little while ago, and
she is relieving me of my administrative burdens here little by little. So
that’s all great.
MS. FEIGIN: Do you want to talk about any of the cases? Have they been filed?
MR. GREEN: It’s just like being in a normal law firm. A lot of the cases, let’s call them
matters, a number of the matters we’re handling are with people where
there’s not active litigation, public active litigation surrounding the issues.
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We are representing them in anticipation of this or that, just as lawyers
frequently do. However other matters are in active litigation. For example,
we represent Cathy Harris. On February 10, 2025, the President removed
Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board prior to her term’s
expiration in 2028. Harris sued for reinstatement on February 11, 2025.
Seven days later, the district court granted her request for a temporary
restraining order, effectively reinstating her to the MSPB. The case then
moved to the D.C. Circuit Court where Ms. Harris was represented by our
law firm. We and co-counsel have filed a conditional petition for certiorari
before judgment in the Supreme Court on behalf of Cathy. The petition
asks the Court to review Harris v. Bessent, but only if the Court grants
review in Trump v. Slaughter, which presents similar issues testing the
President’s entitlement to remove ostensibly protected government
officials.
I should add too, that if anyone’s familiar with the litigation that’s
been ongoing since the president came back to office, much of it has been
to enjoin executive action, enjoin this or to enjoin that. None of that has
really gone to trial. It’s all kind of what I’ll call almost like appellate work.
It’s all briefing and going up to the Court of Appeals and then maybe
hitting the Supreme Court on the emergency docket.
So we do a lot of what I’ll call appellate representation, where
we’re writing briefs, whether they be amicus or whether we’re
representing the client directly. We’re in a couple of cases that may get up
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to the Supreme Court, that will finally settle whether or not the president
has the prerogative to fire anyone in the executive branch at any time, for
any reason whatsoever. Those cases are working their way through the
appellate courts right now.
And then we have some related First Amendment type cases that
are going to come to fruition pretty quickly, where our clients would take
the position that what they were doing or saying was protected by the First
Amendment, and that instead they were retaliated against or terminated.
So we’re in that area as well.
We’re also representing a number of the individuals on the Puerto
Rican Financial Oversight Board who were fired by Trump and who are
territorial officers, and our contention is that under the Constitution the
president doesn’t have the right to remove territorial officers. This case
has implications for officials here in the District who are likely territorial
officers as well and could be subject to removal by the president. The
District Court in Puerto Rico enjoined their removal and the government
has not taken an appeal. So those are some of the cases we are handling.
There are so many other areas out there having to do with conflicts
of interest and corruption and pay-to-play and things like that. But you
have to take the facts as they come. You have to take the clients as they
come and we’ll see what develops.
MS. FEIGIN: Are you working with any other groups? Because there are other groups
doing this, but is each of you operating separately?
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MR. GREEN: There’s collaboration. I like to think that we’re unique because of the
talent that we have that’s working on our matters. I don’t think in general
the appetite at Big Law has changed dramatically to take on these kinds of
cases. But there are lawyers, certainly individual lawyers out there willing
to do pro bono work. Usually they don’t have unlimited capacity to do
that. And so that impacts what they can do and how they can do it. We’re
trying to get over that hump by devoting all our capacity to that.
MS. FEIGIN: And how did you go about raising the funds?
MR. GREEN: I would tackle everybody I saw. [laughter] Go for their wallet. That’s hard
work. The undertaking involves contacting as many individuals as you
possibly can to talk about your mission. And they in turn suggest others,
and you talk to them and you talk to foundations, and you talk, talk, talk,
talk, talk, talk. And eventually you find some people who are sympathetic
to what you’re doing and have the means with which to help you. There’s
no magic to it. It’s all kind of a very personal, person-to-person approach.
MS. FEIGIN: Well, I wish you, I wish the firm all the best. It’s a huge project. Anything
else you want to say about it before we end?
MR. GREEN: I just want to leave on this note: We’re not anti-anything. This law firm is
simply designed to be a real law firm and provide people a defense, if
they’re deserving of a defense, and in certain cases, to initiate litigation on
behalf of a plaintiff where there is a viable and meaningful claim. There’s
no attempt to do anything other than to be extraordinarily professional in
our approach to all of this. We’re not doing silly things. Or as the current
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Attorney General or the President once said, we’re not doing things to be
vexatious. We are real lawyers engaged in lawyering.
MS. FEIGIN: I think anybody who knows you and knows the people on that team would
absolutely presume that. But thank you so much for following up. I will
also have a follow-up a little bit further down the road with John Aldock,
whose oral history is also part of the D.C. Court Historical Society’s
library. And if I do his a bit later on, there may be more details to fill in so
that will be good. Obviously this is something where the litigation can go
on for years. But it’s important that people know it’s happening and they
can follow up. So thank you very, very much for this coda.
