For lawyers working with former President Donald Trump, legal risk is an expected part of the job: More than 40 lawyers who worked to sway the 2020 election on his behalf have faced ethics complaints.
The New York Times reported that legal experts say MAGA now stands for “Making Attorneys Get Attorneys,” based on the reputational risk of working with Trump.
“There’s no way to keep your moral integrity and keep your job,” the dilemma Mr. Trump’s lawyers face: ‘There’s no way not to get into a mess.’
The 65 Project, a bipartisan effort to hold attorneys allied with Trump accountable for filing 65 lawsuits in swing states in an attempt to overturn the legal results of the 2020 election, has filed more than 40 ethics complaints with their respective state bar associations against lawyers who participated in the project.
Among the complaints, including 17 filed last month, are ethics concerns raised against former Trump lawyers John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell and Jenna Ellis.
On January 6, 2021, Eastman asked former Vice President Mike Pence’s legal counsel to break the law and halt the certification process for the 2020 election. He continued to suggest ways to overturn the election until the president took office Joe Biden.
Mitchell is currently leading a group of GOP poll workers to challenge the results in the midterms. Ellis has been ordered to testify before the Fulton County, Georgia special jury investigating whether Trump and his associates tried to interfere in the 2020 election.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s onetime personal attorney, has also been named a target in the Georgia probe and has had his licenses to practice law in the District of Columbia and New York suspended over his allegations of voter fraud.
Another former Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, is under investigation for overseeing an attempt to copy sensitive election data and coordinating a breach of Georgia election records.
Christina Bobb, Trump’s current lawyer, is currently in legal trouble after she signed a letter stating that a “thorough investigation” had been conducted and that all material at Mar-a-Lago at the time had been returned to the US government . per court filing. Two months later, the FBI raided Trump’s golf club in Florida and found 20 boxes of new material, including 11 sets marked as classified.
Michael Cohen, a former Trump lawyer who was sentenced to three years in prison in part for his role in arranging illegal hush payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep her from speaking out about her relationship with Trump, has warned the current legal team of Trump to “lawyer,” citing his own felony charges including tax evasion, campaign finance violations and bank fraud.
“Ultimately, we want to show all the lawyers that the next time Sidney Powell or Rudy Giuliani calls and says, ‘Hey, are you going to sign your name to this,’ they’re going to say ‘no,’ because they’re going to understand that there are professional consequences,” Michael Teter, director of the 65 Project, told the New York Times.
