Trump’s Legal Team Confederacy of Dunces

When one is an attorney, one does not have any obligation to take a legal case if you are conflicted as to the morality of the case and/or the guilt of defendant. Indeed, in a normal court setting, it is unethical for an attorney to argue a defense he/she knows is false so as to work a fraud on the tribunal. Sadly, some attorneys turn a blind to this ethical obligation.  We are now witnessing, in my opinion, a huge ethical fail on the part of Trump's impeachment defense team.   In the case of Jay Sekulow and Pam Bondi, the ethical lapse is no surprise given their histories.  Ditto for Alan Dershowitz who is now arguing the exact opposite of what he argued during the Clinton impeachment leaving one to wonder whether the man has any shame since publicity and whatever Trump is paying him would seem to be all that maters. A column in the Washington Post by former Republican Joe Scarborough looks at Trump's shameless (and, in my view, morally bankrupt) legal defense team.  Here are excerpts:

A confederacy of dunces stumbled onto the Senate floor this week to launch their bewildering defense of President Trump. This misfit band of lawyers brought with them arguments so stunningly stupefying, logic so fatally flawed and a cynicism so brazenly transparent that one suspects Baghdad Bob was viewing the entire spectacle with grudging respect.

On day one of Trump’s impeachment defense, [Trump's] the president’s team dismissed his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a minor player in the Ukrainian affair. Trump lawyer Jane Raskin said he was little more than a “shiny object designed to distract you.” Never mind that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to contact Giuliani, assuring him that “Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you.”

Before Trump made the not-so-perfect call that would eventually lead to his impeachment, Giuliani ran frequent strategy sessions from the second floor of the [Trump's] president’s Washington hotel that were focused on getting Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Giuliani repeatedly pressured U.S. diplomats and State Department employees to push his “drug deal” (as former national security adviser John Bolton described it). At the same time, America’s Mayor kept feeding Trump a steady diet of conspiracy theories that played into the president’s preexisting prejudices against Ukraine. Far from being a bit player and “shiny object,” Giuliani helped build the Democrats’ case for Trump’s impeachment better than anyone else in the president’s inner circle.
 If the claims about Giuliani were not preposterous enough, senators were also forced to endure Kenneth Starr’s self-righteous and hypocritical warnings regarding “the culture of impeachment.” Starr had, after all, once run a four-year investigation into obscure land deals, suicide conspiracy theories and intimate sexual details involving President Bill Clinton. Starr would later claim that Clinton’s abuse of power was the “capstone” of his impeachment case, but that did not stop the former independent counsel from mournfully warning senators Monday that “the commission of a crime is by no means sufficient to warrant the removal of our duly elected president.”

As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes said, “Does Ken Starr know he’s Ken Starr?” That embarrassing performance seemed only to confirm Trump’s previous assessment of the former Clinton prosecutor as a “lunatic” and a “disaster.”

Such insults were never thrown in the direction of Pam Bondi, another member of the president’s legal team. Bondi had safely placed herself in Trump’s good favor by refusing to pursue claims of fraud against Trump University when she was Florida’s attorney general. In 2013, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bondi’s office was deciding whether to join in the lawsuit against Trump. Four days after the article went to print, Bondi’s reelection efforts were boosted by a $25,000 check from Trump’s foundation. Soon after, Bondi announced she would be not suing the reality TV star.

[N]either Bondi nor Starr can be shamed. The same holds true of the other attorneys on the president’s defense team, who sullied their reputations this week defending a shameless huckster, and whom history will judge harshly as those whose dunce routines continued to enable this dangerously unbalanced man.

Wherever these attorneys are admitted to the bar, it might be appropriate to commence disbarment proceedings.   They have definitely violated the code of ethics.