Lawyers’ Group: Trump Legal Team Doesn’t Have A “License To Lie”
A group of more than 1,500 attorneys is calling on the legal profession’s governing body, the American Bar Association, to investigate the conduct of Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s baseless effort to overturn the results of the presidential election.
In an open letter the group Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD) writes, “President Trump’s barrage of litigation is a pretext for a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election, which inevitably will subvert constitutional democracy. Sadly, the president’s primary agents and enablers in this effort are lawyers, obligated by their oath and ethical rules to uphold the rule of law.”
LDAD also specifically calls out lawyers Joseph diGenova, Jenna Ellis, Victoria Toensing and Sidney Powell for their roles in what it calls a “historic abuse of the judicial process.”
“Lawyers who lie to advance the partisan interest of a politician or any client dishonor the constitutional system they’ve sworn to uphold, the legal profession and themselves.
“That dishonor is especially clear in the case of Trump lawyer Joseph DiGenova’s outrageous November 30 statement on Newsmax that former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Christopher Krebs, should be ‘taken out at dawn and shot.'”
On Tuesday Krebs sued the Trump campaign and diGenova in the Circuit Court of Montgomery County Maryland for defamation and making death threats against him.
The group’s letter continues, “A license to practice law is not a license to lie to the public on behalf of a client, whether doing so endangers one individual or the entire body politic. The conduct of Mr. Giuliani and his colleagues is a disgrace. As 25 former DC Bar presidents stated on December 1, it is indefensible for lawyers to falsely proclaim widespread voting fraud, submit a pattern of frivolous court claims and actively seek to undermine citizens’ faith in our election’s integrity.
“We condemn this conduct without reservation. Our profession needs to affirm that this behavior grossly deviates from the bar’s deep commitment to democratic institutions and the fact-based processes that maintain our democracy’s vitality. We urge all lawyers and bar associations to publicly condemn this conduct and bar disciplinary authorities to investigate it. Silence and inaction are not options.”
LDAD is a nonpartisan group of attorneys, including former federal and state judges, United States Attorneys, managing partners of large law firms, law deans and other distinguished lawyers from around the country.