The State Bar Court of California ruled in late March that John Eastman should be disbarred for helping then-President Donald Trump challenge the outcome of the 2020 election.
Mr. Eastman requested that a judge, before the California Supreme Court reviews the case, pause the order prohibiting him from practicing law so he could fund his defense in the criminal case brought against President Trump and his attorneys in Georgia.
Jeffrey Clark, who also tried to help President Trump, is facing a similar disbarment hearing in Washington. The focal point is a “proof of concept” letter he drafted for President Trump in December 2020 that would have asked top Georgia officials to investigate alleged voter fraud in the state.
Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman are the latest attorneys to face backlash from the bar over their actions. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s license was suspended in June 2021 after a court ruled that he made demonstrably false statements while challenging the election results.
Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis have all been sentenced in the Georgia case after making plea deals. Lawrence Joseph, Julia Haller, and Brandon Johnson, who worked on President Trump’s post-election challenges in battleground states, are also facing disciplinary proceedings in Washington.
Other conservative attorneys have faced their own forms of professional repercussions and threats.
Christopher Crowley, a former prosecutor from Fort Myers, Florida, could be suspended by the Florida Bar after an ethics complaint was filed in 2020 for political statements he made about an opponent in a Republican primary for a state attorney election.
William Brown was fired from a prominent law firm in New Jersey for making political remarks about the glorification of violence in hip hop and militant forms of Islam in a December 2023 LinkedIn post.
James Bopp Jr. was subject to an ethics complaint after he asked a judge to recuse himself while representing Michael Gableman in an investigation into Wisconsin’s election commission.
Patrick Leduc was harassed and criticized for representing one of the first defendants to go before a judge in the indictments related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
And Timothy Parlatore faced public outcry for briefly representing President Trump in his Florida classified documents case and the one brought by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith in Washington.
These attorneys have expressed to The Epoch Times a fear that legal proceedings and the legal profession as a whole are increasingly used to pursue lawyers on the right more than lawyers on the left.
Ty Clevenger, a civil rights attorney from Texas, said the alleged politicization of disciplinary actions against lawyers sends the wrong signals.
“The message that’s going out to lawyers is that if you represent the wrong clients, you can pay for it personally,” he told The Epoch Times. “And so it’s not just lawyers who are being intimidated. It’s all the defendants or potential defendants out there who are going to have or are having more difficulty getting lawyers because lawyers don’t want to have to deal with repercussions.”
John Malcolm, a senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation, agreed.
Free Speech and Bar Rules
Indiana University law professor Margaret Tarkington told The Epoch Times that two model rules from the American Bar Association (ABA) have the potential to disproportionately affect conservative attorneys.Rule 8.2 says, “A lawyer shall not make a statement that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge, adjudicatory officer or public legal officer, or of a candidate for election or appointment to judicial or legal office.”
Ms. Tarkington said that although she believes that the rule as it is written seemingly complies with the U.S. Constitution, “the way 8.2 is applied by most states in the United States is absolutely unconstitutional and violates lawyers’ First Amendment rights.”
She said the rule usually targets comments about judges, including judicial candidates, as a means of preserving the “perception of integrity” within the judiciary as a whole.
However, Ms. Tarkington said she believes that it shields judges from “all effective criticism,” including from the very people who know what judges should and shouldn’t be doing: lawyers.
The Florida Bar’s version of this rule was applied to Mr. Crowley when he ran in 2018 for 20th Judicial Circuit state attorney against Amira Fox.
The Florida Bar stated that he “publicly disparaged his opponent through various political campaign materials, advertisements, and social media postings” and violated other rules, including promoting an unlawful raffle lottery, which Mr. Crowley said was settled with a diversion agreement.
He criticized Ms. Fox’s conviction record, called her “corrupt” and “swampy,” and referenced her uncle’s association with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He shared an article on Facebook that referred to Ms. Fox as a “Muslim candidate,” and the Florida Bar stated that he was attacking her religion.
However, Mr. Crowley said he never knew, nor cared, about Ms. Fox’s religion and was merely sharing an article that he didn’t author that discussed her family’s relationship with the PLO, which he sees as a terrorist group.
“So basically, and factually, the Florida Bar is regulating political speech,” he told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Crowley said that in calling Ms. Fox “corrupt,” he cited “facts, figures, and news articles.”
“Now the Florida Bar is saying I cannot do that,” he said.
Ms. Tarkington said rule 8.2 is usually applied to judicial candidates and not state attorney races.
“That is an absolutely bizarre application of that. That is not commonly done,” she said of Mr. Crowley’s Florida Bar ethics complaint.
Mr. Clevenger also took issue with the way ABA rules were applied in the ethics complaints against Mr. Crowley.
“If a lawyer cannot speak frankly and freely during a political campaign, then we just don’t have First Amendment rights anymore,” Mr. Clevenger said.
The ABA creates rule guidelines for state bar associations throughout the country but does not directly “license or discipline lawyers,” an ABA spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
“Each state licenses lawyers and investigates complaints of ethical violations by lawyers licensed in their state,” the spokesperson said. “Usually, it’s the state supreme court or state bar—under the authority of the state supreme court—that does that.”
Still, when state bar associations discipline lawyers such as Mr. Crowley and Mr. Eastman, they refer to rules enacted by the ABA, including 8.2.
There’s also ABA rule 8.4(g), which states that a lawyer shall not “engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.”
This rule is not “narrowly tailored,” Ms. Tarkington said, and it covers comments that could be considered “derogatory or demeaning on a very long list of bases.”
“The problem is a number of conservative viewpoints, whether it be on abortion or on immigration or on traditional marriage, are things that because of the way [8.4(g) is] written, they would have a greater tendency to be problematic,” she said.
Ms. Tarkington said the way the rule is written also creates the “potential for greater restriction and greater discipline of conservative lawyers.”
Election Litigation
Some of the highest-profile disciplinary proceedings against conservative attorneys in recent years have been against the group that helped President Trump dispute the 2020 election results.Beyond Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark, the District of Columbia Bar Discipline Committee recommended disbarring Mr. Giuliani in July 2023, and the final decision will be made by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Ms. Powell and her lawyer, Mr. Joseph, are also facing various repercussions from advancing claims and lawsuits related to the 2020 election results. Ms. Powell was sued by voting machine companies over accusations she made that the 2020 election was rigged against President Trump and was also indicted in the Georgia RICO case along with the former president, Mr. Eastman, Mr. Clark, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Cheseboro, Ms. Ellis, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and others.
Mr. Joseph, like Mr. Clark, received disciplinary charges from the District of Columbia Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel earlier this year.
“[The rules] need to be clarified as to the obligations for when you’re advising or assisting government,” Ms. Tarkington said.
She argued that the rules used to discipline these lawyers are “really broad and amorphous” and that it’s “really hard to know in advance whether whatever you’re doing would violate them.”
Ms. Tarkington said that although she takes issue with those who allegedly helped submit a second slate of electors, she doesn’t believe that disciplinary proceedings should be brought against everyone who represented President Trump or “everyone who filed litigation on his behalf” to challenge the 2020 election results.
The former president had a First Amendment right to challenge the election in court, she said, and “his lawyers had a corresponding First Amendment right to petition on his behalf to associate with him.”
Despite this, groups such as The 65 Project have gone after all the attorneys who filed lawsuits litigating the 2020 election results, including against Mr. Bopp, who represented Mr. Gableman after his investigation into Wisconsin’s election commission. Mr. Bopp received an ethics complaint after asking a judge to recuse himself because he believed that the judge was biased against Mr. Gabelman’s case.
Mr. Bopp, who has practiced law in Indiana for five decades, said he believes that the group is being disingenuous by lumping together all lawyers who brought election lawsuits.
“One of the particularly despicable parts of their campaign is they’re not distinguishing between lawyers who make good faith, perfectly appropriate, under the law challenges” and those who allegedly went beyond the courts with the second slate of electors, he told The Epoch Times.
Cases are usually litigated in one of two ways, Mr. Bopp said. In one, a lawyer already has the facts on hand to sue a party and, for example, seek damages after fighting the case in court.
“The other is that there is a good faith basis for believing that if you did discovery, you could find the facts,” he said.
And if you don’t find the facts, you dismiss the case, according to Mr. Bopp.
He said that if lawyers could only litigate the first kind of cases, “what would be the point of discovery?”
“Well, they’re saying that they’re trying to discipline people because [those people] didn’t already have the facts,” he said.
“And that’s a huge problem for any lawyer.”
Ms. Tarkington said she understands and appreciates what The 65 Project is trying to do but that “you absolutely can’t just say everyone that brought this kind of litigation, or that was involved in the Trump campaign litigation, was unethical, because they weren’t.”
Conservative Attorneys Harassed
Conservative lawyers have not only encountered disciplinary actions for representing certain causes or clients; they have also experienced targeted harassment.Mr. Parlatore spent more than a year representing President Trump in his Florida classified documents case and in the Jan. 6-related case filed in Washington. He told The Epoch Times that after speaking on cable news, he received death threats in voicemails and emails.
He said he believes that Ms. Powell “did a lot of things that she should not have done,” namely saying in court that there was widespread evidence of election fraud before ordering discovery to prove those claims.
However, Mr. Parlatore also said, “I don’t agree with the general weaponization of legal proceedings to go after enemies.”
He also noted that because lawyers have been “disincentivized” from working with President Trump in the first place, his legal team was much smaller than those of others who have challenged elections, such as former President George W. Bush.
President Trump is not the only person who struggles to find legal counsel because of the politicization of jurisprudence. The rioters who were indicted for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach have struggled to find legal representation after major firms throughout the country declined to take their cases.
Mr. Brown said he has a friend who was indicted for being at the protests on Jan. 6, 2021, but never entered the building. Despite that the friend potentially had a more solid case than many of the other defendants, the lawyers at Mr. Brown’s former firm refused to take the case.
Mr. Clevenger said he has a colleague in New York who was fired from his firm for simply offering to represent a Jan. 6 defendant who was accused of participating in an assault, but video evidence “showed unequivocally that he had no role in any assault.”
“You can kiss your career goodbye, kiss your job goodbye if you try to represent a J6 defendant. There’s not a mid-sized or major firm in this country that I know of that would allow you to represent a J6 defendant,” he said.
Since Mr. Leduc operates a private law firm in Tampa, Florida, he was shielded from any threats to his job for representing Paul Hodgkins, one of the first Jan. 6 defendants to plead guilty for his part in the Capitol riots.
However, he was rebuked by the media and other lawyers for alluding in his sentencing memorandum to former President Abraham Lincoln’s call for grace toward the South in his second inaugural address, just 41 days before his assassination.
“I was trying to make the point here that Lincoln saw that the way to heal a nation that had just suffered 623,000 dead over four years was to do something remarkable, which was to give grace [and] give forgiveness,” Mr. Leduc said.
However, he said he saw anything but “grace” in the reaction to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach, with some defendants serving sentences of multiple years for taking part in the riots. He was frustrated to see some participants in the 2020 George Floyd protests receive less punishment for taking part in riots that destroyed businesses.
After representing Mr. Hodgkins, the Tampa attorney received so much harassment in voicemails, texts, and emails that he created a mural with the clippings.
He said the backlash he received is a “reflection of where we’re at as a country,” where intolerance and vengeance are chosen instead of grace.
“And we live in a country today where we’re harsh, we’re ugly, we’re evil to one another. We’re unwilling to forgive,” Mr. Leduc said.
Job Loss
Before working at the Parlatore Law Group with Mr. Parlatore, Mr. Brown was a lawyer focusing on commercial litigation and bankruptcy at a prominent law firm in New Jersey.The former Navy Seal used his GI bill to attend Rutgers University, where he is the current president of veteran alumni.
Mr. Brown said that before his previous firm fired him for making political statements in a LinkedIn post, he had disagreements with the office’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. He said that first, he was rebuffed when he asked whether he could join the committee; they told him the committee already had a veteran on it. Then he was rebuffed again when he noticed that the firm had not sent out any emails on 9/11 to honor those who died during the attacks despite numerous emails from the DEI group honoring LGBT causes.
Mr. Brown said he felt he was targeted for his conservatism and that he was given assignments that most would hate, including representing child molestation defendants, despite being a bankruptcy lawyer by trade. He wondered whether his managers were trying to get him to quit on his own accord rather than fire him directly.
“In my opinion, that’s what they were trying to do. They didn’t want to fire me outright, I think initially because I’m a combat veteran Navy Seal,” he told The Epoch Times.
He wrote that that glorification “had a negative influence on many young and easily impressionable American black youth” and that these negative values shared with militant sects of Islam lead “to a trap, with the real result being a great loss of not even beginning to maximize one’s personal growth potential.”
Mr. Brown is critical of militant Islam after being a first responder to two separate suicide bombings in Iraq, including one of an American cafe in Baghdad’s Green Zone that left many injured and dead.
“It was a really bad picture; people all ripped apart, body parts, people screaming, dead,” Mr. Brown said.
He said his firm fired him for the post, saying that it “promoted negative stereotypes of blacks and Muslims.”
“You know what that is really? They’re basically stating that I was a racist,” Mr. Brown said. “That’s a death sentence in a legal community. Chances are, I will never get a job at another big law firm in the state of New Jersey.”
He said he rejected the firm’s severance package because he didn’t want to be forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement and not speak out about what happened to him.
Law Leans Left
Even before the ethics complaints flowed after the 2020 election, many lawyers saw their profession leaning further to the left than to the right.Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, told The Epoch Times that “there’s no question that the legal industry, especially law schools, tend to lean liberal.”
“This is something across all universities, and law is no different,” he said.
The trend started earlier than the past decade. The authors cited a 1998 study that analyzed “entry-level hires from 1986 to 1991” and found that the self-reported political beliefs of law professors skewed 75 percent liberal and just 10 percent conservative.
This bias apparently also extends to the ABA, which Mr. Rahmani said “tends to be pretty liberal.”
Mr. Malcolm, in agreement, said the organized bar associations have long been “dominated by liberals.”
Mr. Rahmani noted that there might be “certain jurisdictions and pockets of conservatism” in the legal profession, possibly more common in conservative-leaning states, but that in more than 20 years of practicing law, he has seen a profession that is “predominately liberal.”
This also extends to “top-tier law firms,” Mr. Malcolm said.
Not all lawyers agree. Ms. Tarkington, a law professor, is not a believer in a systemic politicization of the legal profession and said judges try “very hard to be impartial.”
However, she noted that model rules, such as the ABA’s 8.2 regarding attorney speech, have the potential to be used politically or unfairly by state bar associations.
“Lawyers are effectively gagged from commenting on what judges do, and that is terribly problematic, and that does need to be changed,” Ms. Tarkington said.
Mr. Parlatore warned that the politicization of law could have reverberating effects. He said it would be a “dangerous situation for justice” if only conservative attorneys could represent conservatives and conservative causes and only liberal attorneys could represent those same figures and pursuits on the left.
“That’s awful,” he told The Epoch Times. “There shouldn’t be politics in the courtroom, period. On either side.”
