President Donald Trump’s lawsuits are so unsuccessful, lawyers are afraid of destroying their careers by working for him. In response, Trump is trying to make it harder to hold dishonest lawyers accountable — and a legal expert is calling out the president for this.
“Like all other lawyers licensed to practice in the United States, if they violate legal ethics rules, they can face sanctions in court or professional discipline, up to and including the permanent loss of their license to practice,” Deborah Pearlstein, the director of the Princeton program in law and public policy and a visiting professor of law at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs, wrote for The New York Times. “Efforts to overturn the 2020 election foundered in court more than 60 times, before judges of both parties, in part because lawyers arguing President Trump’s case often feared telling a court the same extravagant lies that he was telling the American people.”
Noting that the Trump administration is so desperate for lawyers, one conservative law school reportedly told students “Don’t be scared off by the transcript requirement. G.P.A. is not a strong factor,” Pearlstein said that lawyers are still shy about working for Trump, so he is instead trying to remove the risk of professional ramifications. He wants to impose “a proposed rule that aims to shield Department of Justice lawyers from independent ethics investigations.”
Pearlstein explained that this would be a disaster.
“Coupled with other deterrents — the courts themselves and lawyers’ concern for their own reputations — the risk of state bar discipline remains a critical tool for protecting the truth-finding function of the federal courts,” Pearlstein wrote. “No wonder the administration is determined to go after them. The move against state bars is of a piece with the administration’s broader strategy against universities, the media and law firms — any set of organizations capable of challenging the president’s power.”
She concluded, “And few things threaten it more than holding it to the truth.”
Pearlstein is an outspoken critic of Trump. Talking to Slate earlier in March, she said that Trump has succeeded in chilling law firms from working on causes which his administration opposes.
“The goal of chilling the willingness of any firm to take on causes adverse to the administration has been achieved, and then some,” Peralstein argued. “That’s one of the really important broader lessons in countering authoritarianism. You need a whole toolbox full of tools, and litigation is an incredibly important tool for some purposes, but it doesn’t work for everything. It is entirely possible to win the litigation battle and lose the authoritarian war, and in this particular fight, that’s the direction we’re headed."
In addition to potentially ruining the careers of lawyers who work for him, Trump has also failed overwhelmingly in the courts themselves. The New York Times found earlier this week that Trump has lost almost 200 lawsuits related to his efforts to seize funding powers from Congress.