For nearly two decades, Rep. Devin Nunes had enjoyed an amiable relationship with the Fresno Bee, the largest local paper near his district in California’s Central Valley. That ended on January 25, when the Bee’s editorial board published an eviscerating editorial about the veteran Republican congressman. Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had been accusing the FBI of allegedly abusing a secret surveillance program in order to target the Trump campaign and undermine his presidency. Democrats said Nunes was attempting to discredit his own committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Nunes claimed that a soon-to-be declassified four-page memo he’d written would prove everything.

The Bee‘s editorial board wasn’t buying it. Its piece titled “Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s Stooge, Attacks FBI” opened with this no-holds-barred lead:

What, pray tell, does Rep. Devin Nunes think he’s doing by waving around a secret memo attacking the FBI, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency? He certainly isn’t representing his Central Valley constituents or Californians, who care much more about health care, jobs and, yes, protecting Dreamers than about the latest conspiracy theory. Instead, he’s doing dirty work for House Republican leaders trying to protect President Donald Trump in the Russia investigation.

It was the first public rift between the Bee‘s editorial board and the veteran Tulare County Republican. The Bee‘s editorial page had stayed silent eight months earlier when Nunes made headlines with his “midnight run” to the White House, when he purportedly read classified documents and then held a solo press conference the next morning to repeat the Trump administration’s claims that the Obama administration may have illegally spied on its transition team. The much-hyped Nunes memo, however, marked a turning point. “This was not something we took lightly. It was very seriously thought out,” says Gail Marshall, the Bee‘s editorial page editor. “We wanted to get his attention and the attention of the people on this direction he’s going. And I think it succeeded in that.”

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach committed ethical violations during the just-completed trial over the state’s voter registration law, a Kansas immigration lawyer alleges in a bar complaint.

Matthew Hoppock, who practices in Overland Park, said he was duty-bound to file the complaint as an officer of the court.

“I have to,” he told KCUR. “Any licensed attorney in Kansas who thinks another attorney has broken the rules is required to."....

Although he declined to spell out the contents of his bar complaint, Hoppock’s tweets made clear he believes Kobach violated at least four of the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct, the canons governing attorney behavior:

By acting as an attorney and serving as a fact witness in the same case, Kobach violated the rule that bars lawyers from acting as advocates at a trial in which they themselves are witnesses.
Because U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson found before the trial that Kobach had made “patently misleading representations to the court,” Kobach violated the rule prohibiting attorneys from knowingly making false statements to the court.
By missing filing deadlines, Kobach violated the rule requiring attorneys to “act with reasonable diligence and promptness in representing a client.”
Because he was repeatedly chastised by the judge for running afoul of evidentiary rules during the trial, Kobach violated the rule requiring attorneys to “provide competent representation to a client.

Here’s a running list of law firms and attorneys who have decided they don’t want to represent the president. Please send a note to tips@abovethelaw.com if there are firms that we’re missing or attorneys who have been approached that we just don’t know about. Here’s who we do know about:

Brendan Sullivan, Williams & Connolly: Sullivan represented Oliver North after the Iran-Contra scandal, but won’t represent Donald Trump.
Paul Clement, Kirkland & Ellis: Clement defended DOMA — the Defense of Marriage Act — and was a leading litigator in the constitutional challenges to Obamacare. But he won’t represent the leader of the Republican party.
Mark Filip, Kirkland & Ellis: Filip is a big-time white-collar defense lawyer who served as Deputy Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration. He was unwilling to return to government work to help defend the current president.
Robert Giuffra, Sullivan & Cromwell: Guiffra represents Volkswagon in its litigation about using devices to thwart clean-air standards, and defended UBS from disaffected Enron shareholders. Defending Trump’s financial dealings from Robert Mueller was apparently not something he wanted to do.
Emmet Flood, Williams & Connolly: Emmet Flood represented Bill Clinton in his impeachment hearing. Of course, Clinton was impeached (just not convicted), and we know that Trump prefers soldiers who never captured.
Robert S. Bennett, Hogan Lovells: Bennett represented Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones dispute. Seems relevant.
Theodore Olson, Gibson Dunn: Ted Olson represented George W. Bush in the Bush v. Gore case where the Supreme Court chose the American president. And he wants no part of Trump.

A judge on Tuesday ordered Gov. Rick Scott and the Cabinet to dismantle Florida’s “fatally flawed” system of arbitrarily restoring voting rights to felons and to replace it by April 26.

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee issued a permanent injunction in support of the Fair Elections Legal Network, which sued the state a year ago. The group successfully challenged the constitutionality of the state’s 150-year-old voting rights restoration process for felons in the nation’s third-largest state.

“This is a victory for the principle that the right to vote cannot be subjected to officials’ gut instincts and whims,” said Jon Sherman, senior counsel for the nonprofit voting rights group. “We are also heartened that the court prevented Florida from following through on its threat to be the only state in the nation with an irrevocable lifetime ban on voting for all former felons — what the court called ‘the ultimate arbitrary act.’ ”

A spokesman for Scott issued a statement that defended the current system.

The voter fraud thesis fell apart in truly spectacular fashion under examination, and could very well result in the overturning of the law, the denial of one witness as an “expert” in future testimony, and even a finding that Mr. Kobach be held in contempt of court. To understand how things could have possibly gone so badly for Mr. Kobach, consider some the highlights of the trial, wherein the “science” used to claim that voter fraud is rampant dissolves before our eyes, much like the Kobach Commission:

Hans Von Spakovsky, a fellow member of the Kobach Commission, had to acknowledge early on that his research on voter fraud has not been subjected to peer review, and further acknowledged that all of his inferences about voter fraud in Kansas were based on a spreadsheet provided by Mr. Kobach.
Regarding the frequent comment that known accounts of voter fraud are “just the tip of the iceberg,” lead counsel for plaintiffs Dale Ho asked “You don’t have any estimate of the size of the iceberg, is that right Mr. Von Spakovsky?” Von Spakovsky: “That’s correct.”
Cross-examination also revealed that Von Spakovsky’s submitted court report contained incomplete information that made it possible for him to inflate estimates of non-citizen registration. Subsequently, plaintiffs asked Judge Julie Robinson to make a finding that Von Spakovsky is not an objective expert, having offered incomplete and misleading testimony.