Much of the legal community failed their country and the cause of justice in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. Lawyers took frivolous cases seeking to overturn an election without any evidence of fraud. Many Republican House members who are also lawyers signed onto a brief attempting to disenfranchise millions of voters to install their losing candidate as president. One lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, participated in a phone call with the disgraced president in which he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s presidential result. (At least Mitchell was compelled to leave her law firm.) Lawyers in state legislatures are pursuing fake audits attempting to undermine the results of the election.

The country’s top prosecutor also failed miserably to protect the rule of law. Then-Attorney General William P. Barr helped sow doubt about mail-in ballots, stepped in to protect presidential crony Roger Stone from a lengthy prison sentence, misled the country and Congress about the contents of the Mueller report and apparently found no problem with his boss’s attempt to extort Ukraine to manufacture dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden.

And to make matters worse, no state bar association has meted out any punishment for lawyers who plainly violated their professional obligations — although, thankfully, New York judges, who preside over disciplinary measures for lawyers in their state, suspended Rudolph W. Giuliani’s license.

Not since Watergate have so many attorneys so besmirched the legal profession. And unlike Watergate, when multiple lawyers lost their licenses or served jail time, today’s crop of miscreant lawyers have largely gotten off scot-free.

Since President Trump lost the 2020 election, his campaign aides have repeatedly appeared on Fox News to tease baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

That’s why it was so satisfying that a federal judge last week stripped the bark off the former president’s lawyers. Michigan District Judge Linda V. Parker on Monday showed how it should be done: In a five-hour hearing to assess whether lawyers should be sanctioned for their behavior, Parker marched Sidney Powell and the rest of the former president’s legal team through their spurious pleadings that had sought to invalidate Michigan’s presidential vote — which was not even close. (Biden won the state by about 150,000 votes.)

Parker instructed the lawyers: “There is a responsibility, there’s a duty that counsel has to ensure that when you’re submitting a sworn statement … as evidentiary support of your claims, that you have reviewed it, that you have done some minimal due diligence.”

Parker quizzed the lawyers about whether there is any legal basis to ask a judge to decertify an election and name a new winner. And she spent hours asking the attorneys to explain how closely they had reviewed and vetted information submitted in hundreds of pages of sworn declarations that they had told the court constituted evidence of purported fraud and irregularities.
The judge noted that one observer stated in an affidavit that she believed she saw election workers switching votes from Trump to Biden. Parker asked whether any of the lawyers had spoken to the witness and inquired what exactly she saw that led her to believe that votes had been switched. She was greeted with silence.
“Anyone?” she asked again.
When no one answered a second time, she said: “Let the record reflect that no one made that inquiry, which was central to [the] allegation.”

Parker deftly laid bare the extent of the lawyers’ cynical exploitation of the legal system and the utter dearth of evidence of fraud. During the post-election period, many Republicans insisted that the president had the right to bring his claims to court. That was not correct. No client or lawyer has a right to bring baseless, frivolous claims containing nothing more than wild speculation and conspiracy theories.

Parker has the power to require these lawyers “to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials,” The Post noted. She is also empowered to force them to pay “additional monetary penalties” or recommend disciplinary hearings that could result in disbarment.

It is a mystery why similar proceedings have not been opened in all the cases which the former president’s lawyers brought — and lost — claims attempting to subvert our democracy. Judges with the power to assess sanctions and bar associations with the power to discipline or disbar these individuals must follow Parker’s lead. Members of the legal profession — including Barr — must be held accountable for their failure to uphold professional obligations and their role in subverting U.S. democracy.

For exposing the extent of Trump lawyers’ malfeasance and restating the obligation of lawyers as officers of the court, we can say, well done Judge Parker.