While pondering the pathetic fates of three Trump legal eagles – Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Lin Wood – I’m reminded of a line from an old Jackson Browne song:
“the strangled cries of lawyers in love“
Plus, this old cliche:
“When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.“
How satisfying it has been, these last few days, to see those guys suffer the consequences of fronting for a crime boss. Lawyers with even a smidgen of integrity know full well that there are lines they should not cross, even when the client is a fascist lowlife. But this toxic trio was apparently so in love with their client that they disgraced themselves and soiled the legal profession. Now they’re paying the price.
John Eastman, who won Trump’s heart with his cockamamie scheme to throw out Joe Biden’s wins in seven key states and substitute fake electors, is currently on trial by the California bar – in layman’s terms, he’s charged with trying to sabotage the U.S Constitution – and he’ll likely lose his law license. (Lest we forget, he also stoked the Jan. 6 mob with fake claims of Democratic fraud. After the mob went wild at the Capitol, one of Mike Pence’s lawyers emailed this gem to Eastman: “Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.”)
Lin Wood, a Georgia lawyer who pushed the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” in Georgia and elsewhere, announced last week that he’s giving up his law license – one step ahead of disbarment proceedings. The Georgia State Bar said that Wood’s sudden decision to retire “has achieved the (bar’s) goals of disciplinary action, including protecting the public and the integrity of the judicial system and the legal profession.”
And then there’s Rudy, the conspiracy freak and Four Seasons Total Landscaping host who followed Trump down the rabbit hole and destroyed himself in the process. Last Friday, an ethics panel for the Washington D.C. bar – having weighed Giuliani’s misconduct during a December trial – unanimously recommended that he be permanently stripped of his professional bona fides. This disbarment admonition must still be ratified by higher-ups, but it’s hard to imagine that the panel’s scathing fact-packed conclusions will be overruled. Check ’em out:
“(Giuliani) attempted unjustifiably and without precedent to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters, and ultimately sought to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it…his hyperbolic claims of election fraud and the core thesis of the Pennsylvania litigation were utterly false, and recklessly so. Mr. Giuliani’s rash overstatement claiming that the election was stolen had no evidence to support it. His utter disregard for facts denigrates the legal profession…
“Finally, public confidence in our courts, the law, and the legal profession are very much at stake in this unprecedented case. We cannot blind ourselves to the broader context in which Mr. Giuliani’s misconduct took place. It was calculated to undermine the basic premise of our democratic form of government: that elections are determined by the voters. The Pennsylvania claims were carefully calibrated to blend into a nationwide cascade of litigation intended to overturn the presidential election…
“(N)o president – until 2020 – refused to accept defeat and step away from that office. And no lawyer – until 2020 – used frivolous claims of election fraud to impede the peaceful transition of presidential power and disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters. Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy. His malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage and are antagonistic to the oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States of America’ that he swore when he was admitted to the Bar.”
I remember back in 2018 when Rudy went on TV and declared: “Truth isn’t truth.” Turns out, it is.
Even though tens of millions of Americans have become deaf and dumb to reality, even though big lies have become embedded in the dead space between their ears, it’s heartening to know that a grifter like Eastman can face consequences for violating (in the words of the California bar trial counsel) “our values as a nation,” that the aforementioned trio might even be indicted by the feds for their roles in the failed coup, and, best of all, that the squeaky wheels of justice are still grinding in this country.
It’s enough to make you feel patriotic.