Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Trump's Lawyer Co-conspirators: A Stain on the Legal Profession

Having been engaged in the legal profession for a number of decades I have encountered a number of unethical attorneys who have been motivated by a quest for wealth and/or power and influence.  Any ethical considerations easily flushed down the toilet if they got in the way of money and power.  Sadly, many were never held to account thanks to state bar organizations that either move at a snail's pace or who are hesitant to take on members of large firms or those with powerful political connections.  The result is that small time attorneys get disciplined and disbarred while "pillars of the community" are free to pursue their amoral endeavors (I was in one law firm where the level of amorality was like something out of John Grisham's book "The Firm").  All of this leads me to the fact that a goodly number of Donald Trump's co-conspirators in both the federal indictments and the just released Georgia indictments are lawyers who surely knew what they were doing was illegal yet put money and power ahead of all else.  The actions they undertook went miles beyond zealous representation and were nothing less than outright lies and fraud.   A piece in the New York Times looks at this reality and raises the questio as to how the legal profession can counter and increasingly ideological driven legal realm where ethics simply do not matter to some.  Here are highlights:

The second federal indictment [and now Georgia indictment] of Donald Trump describes conduct that posed a profound threat to our constitutional democracy — conduct that deserves serious punishment if proven. But the former president did not act alone. At least five and perhaps all six of the individuals who are alleged to have conspired with Mr. Trump to strip millions of Americans of their right to have their votes counted had a special duty to protect our constitutional system. They were lawyers.

The former senior Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and the former law school dean John Eastman, who seem plainly to be two of the unnamed co-conspirators, are hardly representative of the million-plus practicing lawyers in the United States. Thousands of lawyers, most of them career civil servants, served honorably in Mr. Trump’s administration.

A few, such as the senior Justice Department attorneys Jeffrey Rosen, Richard Donoghue and Steven Engle, risked their jobs to prevent Mr. Trump from enacting some of his darkest election subversion schemes. And lawyers appointed by Mr. Trump to the federal bench were likewise among the dozens of judges who rejected his meritless lawsuits challenging the election in the courts. These lawyers served as powerful checks against Mr. Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.

But at the same time, the key role lawyers played in buttressing the former president’s plans speaks to a troubling crisis in the legal profession. The lawyers he conspired with — whose alleged conduct breached a host of rules of professional ethics, in addition to provisions of criminal law — did not emerge from whole cloth. They are the product of a profession that has changed over the past 40 years, in ways that tend to reduce the supply of Rosen-type lawyers in public roles, and increase the supply of Clarks. And unless we make changes in the structure of public lawyering and the professional path lawyers take to get there, we will not only lose one of our most effective checks against authoritarian power, we could accelerate its consolidation.

Scandals among presidential lawyers are, of course, hardly new. By the end of the Watergate revelations, no fewer than 29 lawyers — including two of President Richard Nixon’s handpicked attorneys general — faced sanctions for failing to check presidential misconduct, and lying to facilitate its commission. Both government and professional associations responded by adopting a revolutionary set of reforms, aimed at reinforcing the rule of law as a guardrail of constitutional democracy. The American Bar Association revised its influential model rules of professional ethics to make clear that lawyers who work for any organization, including the government, have a duty to report any unlawful acts of federal officials they encounter in the course of their work.

Congress, too, considered proposals to radically reform government lawyering — from requiring the attorney general to belong to a different political party than the president, to making him or her fully independent of the executive branch (and free from the president’s supervision or interference). To stave off these more dramatic measures, President Gerald Ford’s attorney general ordered the creation of a new Office of Professional Responsibility, charged with reviewing allegations that any department employee was violating legal or ethical rules — an office that exists to this day.

The parallels in lawyerly misconduct between Watergate and today are evident: Mr. Eastman is facing “moral turpitude” charges in California, Rudy Giuliani faces disbarment in Washington, D.C., and they’re far from the only ones. Dozens of other lawyers who represented Mr. Trump in election litigation now face misconduct allegations in state disciplinary proceedings nationwide.

But the prospects for systemic reform seem far less promising than they did half a century ago. Today, the formally nonpartisan A.B.A., which 40 years ago claimed the membership of about half of American lawyers, now represents roughly a fifth of them, its influence supplanted in key respects by more partisan alliances, the conservative Federalist Society most influential among them.

The effect of this partisan shift has not been limited to the courts. From law school to law practice to government service, elite lawyers can today move through their careers along effectively parallel professional paths. Most major private law firms with Supreme Court practices today consistently show an evident preference for hiring former clerks from judicial chambers on the firm’s preferred side of the political spectrum.

Conservatives in recent decades have worked to expand the role of partisan lawyering further still, even attempting to give hiring preference to conservative lawyers in career government service positions, jobs that post-Watergate civil service laws aimed to insulate from exactly such partisan pressures. Such moves send a clear signal to young lawyers: ideological loyalty is a credential, not a disqualification.

In the meantime, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducts far fewer ethics investigations than it did even as recently as the 1990s; these days, its active caseload is almost nonexistent. . . . thanks to the modern system of professional rewards, breaking ethical rules in the interest of securing partisan advantage has even won some lawyers nominations to the federal bench.

In this environment, it is not hard to see why government lawyers like Mr. Clark and even nongovernment lawyers like Mr. Eastman might have come to believe that their best path to career success was to elevate partisan loyalty over professional ethics. And it is not hard to see why these incentives may prove devastating for constitutional democracy.

The Trump case shows lawyers not only failing to make sure their government clients operate within the bounds of our democratic system, but stretching to help those clients craft ways to subvert it. The risk to the rule of law is equally apparent.

Changing the increasingly polarized nature of the legal profession is a more complex enterprise — one centrally bound up in how we learn, teach, reward and punish what lawyers do. It is a long-term project. With little time to lose.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Trump Indicted on 13 Counts in Georgia

To the surprise of no one other than perhaps delusional MAGA cultists, Donald Trump has been indicted on 13 counts in Georgia, including under the state's racketeering statute.  Trump, true to form has responded with lies and claims that like anything else that seeks to hold him accountable this is a "witch hunt" - the same kind of lies that got him into trouble in the first place. As a piece in the Washington Post notes, the opening paragraph of the indictments provides a succinct summary:

“Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states,” . . . 

Trump is not the only party indicted.  The others include Mark Meadows, former chief if staff, a group of Trump's ghoulish lawyers, and some Georgia Republican officials.  How the indictments and ultimate trial will play out will only be shown with the passage of time, yet sane, sentient and moral people already know that Trump and his conspirators are guilty as hell.    Trump has until August 25th to turn himself in and one can only hope the judge on the case makes it clear to Trump that if he keeps up the lies and attacks on witnesses and jurors he will be put behind bars.  Here is more from the Post piece:

Who: The co-conspirators include, Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani, Trump legal adviser John Eastman, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, and Georgia officials Shawn Still and David Shafer.

Why racketeering: The RICO charges “allows a lot of different things to be pulled together into a single very serious criminal charge,” Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told our colleague Amber Phillips. 

Willis, who is known to say, “I don’t like a bully,” said in an interview with The Post last year that she likes the anti-racketeering law because “it allows you to tell jurors the full story.”

When: In a brief news conference after the indictment was unsealed, Willis said she wants the trial to start in the next six months. The Iowa caucuses are five months from today. 

Trump faces court dates from January to May 2024 in his other three indictments. 

The (predictable) reaction: 

• Trump’s team in a lengthy news release immediately attacked Willis, her family, and alleged a “suspiciously long” investigation “timed to interfere with the 2024 presidential election.”
• House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tweeted: “A radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans see through this desperate sham.” 

Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, one of the few willing to criticize Trump, said that he believes more than ever that Trump’s actions “disqualifies him from ever serving as president again.”

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Dangerous Lost Boys of the American Right

Hate and bigotry based on race, religion, sexual orientation and national origin have long been a steady undercurrent of American society, yet since Donald Trump's launch of his 2016 campaign when he depicted Hispanics as an evil enemy such hatreds have been not only mainstreamed but also given a level of respectability in "conservative" and Republican circles.  One need look no further than Ron DeSantis' campaign - aided by Republicans in the Florida legislature - to see that open war has been declared against gays and blacks not to mention women who want control over their own bodies. DeSantis' message of hate stems in part from his desire to appeal to the "Christian" extremist and white supremacist dominated base of today's Republican Party.  As a column in the New York Times analyzes it also stems from the toxic masculinity so prized among those on the far right that needs someone to denigrate and marginalize to infuse itself with a sense of self worth - and someone to blame for one's own failures and lack of accomplishments.   Then, of course, you have the grifters who use hatred to thrill their audiences while enriching themselves.  How this viciousness can be ended is hard to say, but it is clearly a societal threat. Here are column highlights:

Since the ascendance of Donald Trump, with depressing regularity, right-wing men have been outed for using the most vile rhetoric. In private chats and sometimes in full view of the public on social media, they’ll engage in blatantly racist, sexist and homophobic speech, flirt with fascist imagery and then often disavow their words and actions the instant they’re caught.

The examples are legion, and they’re not coming from fringe outlets on the American right. For example, last month, the Ron DeSantis campaign parted ways with a young speechwriter named Nate Hochman who reportedly inserted a Nazi sonnenrad symbol into a pro-DeSantis video online. Hochman was previously under fire for telling Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist . . . Hochman responded, “I said some really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe, that signaled agreement with Fuentes, even though I couldn’t disagree more with his vision of the world.” Roughly a year after that incident, according to Axios, he created the sonnenrad video.

Was Hochman fringe? Hardly. Before he joined the DeSantis campaign, he worked as a staff writer at National Review and interned at The Dispatch, where I worked as a senior editor before joining The New York Times. He even once wrote for The Times.

Hochman is not alone. In June the right-wing publication Breitbart published group chats and private messages from Pedro Gonzalez, a popular online influencer and DeSantis supporter, which included comments like “Whites are the only hope nonwhites have of living civilized lives” and “The only tactical consideration of Jews is screening them for movements,” along with a host of other comments not suitable for a family publication.

This month HuffPost reported that Richard Hanania, an influential anti-woke writer, published a series of pseudonymous posts at racist publications in the late 2000s and early 2010s. . . . . close observers of his contemporary work were hardly surprised by the revelations. Just this past May, for example, he posted in a thread on crime that America needs “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of Black people.”

The September issue of The Atlantic contains Graeme Wood’s fascinating and disturbing profile of a man named Costin Alamariu, better known online as Bronze Age Pervert, who has a cult following among the young right. Alamariu argues, writes Wood, “that the natural and desirable condition of life is the domination of the weak and ugly by the strong and noble. He considers American cities a ‘wasteland’ run by Jews and Black people . . .

Terrible stuff. And even more terrible is the realization that I could fill this entire column with other examples of right-wing bigotry, from Christian nationalists, a former Trump speechwriter, a former Daily Caller editor and one of Tucker Carlson’s former top writers. And this is hardly a complete list. The problem is so widespread . . .

What is going on? Why are parts of the right — especially the young right — so infested with outright racists and bigots?

Some readers might respond to my question with a question: Why am I surprised? The right has always been infested with racists and bigots, you might argue. Yet while I freely acknowledge that there was more racism on the right than I was willing or able to see before the rise of Trump, there has been a distinct change in young right-wing culture. It is dramatically different from what it was when I was in college, in law school and starting my legal career.

As I survey the right — especially the young, so-called new right — I see a movement in the grip of some rather simple but powerful cultural forces. Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice. Contrary to their self-conception, they’re not strong or tough or courageous.

A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way, and conservatism conserved nothing. The left, in their mind, is winning the culture war in a rout.

And here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise. To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool.

But what happens if you disagree? What happens if you ask: Wait, are we going too far? Well, then, you’re weak and small. . . . . Worse still, even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction. . . . So in the name of strength, these young men capitulate until their minds and hearts are warped beyond recognition.

In the meantime, these angry online sheep can still bite. They’re using their platforms to whip countless Americans into their own frenzy of fear. We should expect more bigotry and more revelations. Dark words spoken in secret will spill out into the public square. The lost boys of the American right corrupt our culture. Full of fury against their opponents and afraid of running afoul of their “friends,” they poison our politics and damage their own souls.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty