Trump's Lawyers Just Got Sent Packing Over Their M
Post# of 123709
This is the polite legal way of telling the world that, hey, those rats didn’t fck themselves.
_By Charles P. Pierce
Aug 26, 2021
washington, united states nov 19 attorney sidney powell speaks during a news conference with rudy giuliani, lawyer for us president donald trump, about lawsuits contesting the results of the presidential election at the republican national committee headquarters in washington, dc, on thursday nov 19, 2020 photo by sarah silbiger for the washington post via getty images
The Washington Post / Getty Images
Sometimes the bear eats you, and then invites its neighbors, the wolverines, over to feast on the leftovers. From the Washington Post:
In a scathing 110-page opinion, Federal District Judge Linda V. Parker wrote that the lawyers had made assertions in court that were not backed by evidence and had failed to do the due diligence required by legal rules before alleging mass fraud in the Michigan vote. “This case was never about fraud,” she wrote. “It was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”
She ordered the lawyers to pay the attorney’s fees for their opponents in the case — the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan. She also wrote that she will require them to attend legal education classes. And she referred the group to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, as well as attorney disciplinary committees in the states where each attorney is licensed, which could initiate proceedings that could result in the lawyer’s being disbarred.
This is the polite legal way of telling the world that, hey, those rats didn’t fck themselves.
There’s a serious psychological study to be done on the subject of When Lawyers Go Bad along the lines of those done on doctors who end up prescribing speed for themselves.
Lin Wood was Richard Jewell’s lawyer when Jewell was pilloried falsely for the Atlanta Olympic bombing. Sidney Powell was an assistant U.S. attorney and prosecuted drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra for the latter’s role in the assassination of federal judge John Wood. (Charles Harrelson, father of Woody, was the triggerman in that episode and died in SuperMax.) These were serious people before they became nationally known rodeo clowns. Something went badly wrong in them.
The requirement that they go back to the legal equivalent of drunk school reminds us of the last prominent person upon whom this edict was levied. It was our old friend Kris Kobach. In June of 2018, in his attempt to defend the unconscionable voter-suppression system in which Kobach had engaged the state of Kansas as its Secretary of State.
Specifically, this involved a proof of citizenship law that was close to Kobach’s heart. Kobach represented himself in court and was so contemptuous or ignorant of civil procedure that the judge held him in contempt and demanded he go to legal summer school for some refresher courses.
(Kobach went on to lose a race for Kansas governor, and another one for the Senate. He also was the chairman of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago’s doomed “voter integrity” commission, which left pieces of itself all over the landscape. Undaunted, he is currently back in Kansas running for…wait for it…attorney general.)
The one thread connecting these two stories, and the one that gives them a common denouement, is the determined long-term campaign by Republican conservatives to monkey-wrench the franchise to their own advantage.
And the way you know that campaign is based on stuff, nonsense, and bullshit is that, in both these cases, called to defend the elements of that campaign in court, its proponents wound top putting themselves on trial. And losing.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...%20Openers