NYT Op Ed "Lawyers Enabled Trump's Worst Abuses"
The legal profession must reckon with its complicity in Trump’s attack on democracy.
By Sherrilyn A. Ifill
Ms. Ifill is a lawyer and author. She is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., a civil rights legal organization.
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.
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The Model Rules of Professional Conduct bar attorneys from abusing the legal process, and yet for weeks on end a cohort of attorneys — including attorneys general from 17 states who supported the Texas lawsuit seeking to delay the election certification — did just that on the president’s behalf following his electoral loss in November. Is it enough that nearly every judge they faced booted out their cases unceremoniously? Is that sufficient deterrence to other attorneys to refrain from the egregious conduct that unnecessarily expended court resources, but also kept alive a fraudulent narrative advanced by the president that the election had been “stolen,” which ultimately led to the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6? Obviously not. Attorneys must face professional censure for such conduct, and the law firms where these lawyers serve as partners should be compelled to review their own standards for leadership.
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sorry about the paywall - worthwhile read
= new reply since forum marked as read
