Lawyers Enabled Trump's Worst Abuses
Link to tweet
Sherrilyn Ifill
@Sifill_LDF
I’ve been writing a version of this piece in my head for two years. It’s time for our profession to confront the role of lawyers in abetting the unraveling of American democracy.
Opinion | Lawyers Enabled Trump’s Worst Abuses
The legal profession must reckon with its complicity in Trump’s attack on democracy.
nytimes.com
6:30 AM · Feb 12, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/opinion/politics/trump-lawyers.html
Every day, we learn more about the concerted attack on American democracy perpetuated to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. But the violent storming of the Capitol was only its most visible and ugly climax. What has become disturbingly and abundantly clear is that whether through former President Donald Trump’s relentless and meritless lawsuits, the plot in the Department of Justice to remove the acting attorney general, or a congressional plan in which members — including two former Supreme Court clerks — perpetuated false unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud, attorneys played a central role in enabling the most dangerous assault on American democracy in more than a century.
The appalling conduct of the lawyers at the highest levels of government who behaved so shamelessly in seeking to maintain Trump in office was not an aberration, but a continuation. Throughout Trump’s presidency, lawyers were centrally involved in perpetuating some of its most repugnant excesses. Attorney General Jeff Sessions helped develop the concept of family separation as a migration deterrent. His deputy, Rod Rosenstein, reportedly signed off on applying the policy no matter the age of the child. Sessions’s successor, Bill Barr, misrepresented the Mueller team’s findings and interfered with the sentencing of Trump advisers Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
Despite this, there was little condemnation from the leadership institutions of our profession. The American Law Institute invited Mr. Barr to speak just months after his hijacking of the Mueller report, and ensured that there was no opportunity for questions from the audience. And neither judicial nor prosecutors’ associations ever issued condemnatory statements when Mr. Trump incited threats against the Black jury forewoman in Mr. Stone’s case.
The upending of norms and standards carried into the legislative and judicial branches as well. Many cabinet and judicial nominees, beginning with Mr. Sessions himself, made a mockery of the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation process by providing misleading information on their confirmation questionnaires — which are submitted under penalty of perjury. Neither Mr. Sessions nor other nominees were held accountable for these misrepresentations. Instead, almost all were confirmed.
*snip*
= new reply since forum marked as read
I was trained as a lawyer and practiced civil litigation and appeals for some 20 years before switching careers and then retiring, but even after going into another line of work I tried to keep up to date on legal issues, and taught a law-related college class until just a couple of years ago. I've watched with horror as Trump's DoJ descended into partisan awfulness under Jeff Sessions, a guy whose racism was so obvious that he was denied a federal judgeship, and then into an even worse mess under Bill Barr. But the most dispiriting legal shenanigans arose during the post-election period, when dozens of lawyers were willing to whore themselves out on Trump's behalf by filing lawsuits that were so frivolous that they wouldn't have passed muster in a first-year civil procedure class. I think the only reason these lawyers didn't have the Rule 11 hammer dropped on their heads is that these were almost all applications for some kind of emergency relief and there wasn't enough time to jump through the procedural hoops the rule requires. But I was just amazed at how bad, stupid and meritless they all were, and I wondered how any lawyer could appear in public (especially at a bar association meeting) without shame after filing such rank nonsense.
All clients are entitled to their attorney's zealous and devoted representation, but the caveat is that the law can't be ignored in the process - yet that's exactly what dozens of lawyers did. Every last damn one of them should be disciplined by their state's licensing board. I hope every law school uses these cases in their professional responsibility classes as examples of what no lawyer should ever, ever do, no matter how much money they are offered or how enthusiastically they ascribe to their client's politics.
