As with the despicable November video, there is nothing in the new opinion that constitutes new or urgent information, a new interpretation, a solution of a persistent legal ethics dilemma or controversy, or any other legitimate justification for creating and releasing it at all. Formal Ethics Opinions are supposed to be “advisory interpretations of the rules governing legal professional conduct, created to guide lawyers through complex or ambiguous ethical scenarios.” Rule 1.13 itself exists to guide lawyers through the complex ethical scenario of realizing that an officer or employee of the organization they work for is violating the law or otherwise engaging in harmful and unethical conduct. What 524 does, by focusing only on government lawyers, is to tell lawyers who work for the government—this particular government—to watch out, there are evil doings a foot, and it is their ethical duty to identify them, expose them and stop them.

It is virtue-signaling to lawyers, who are already overwhelmingly progressive in great part due to the indoctrination practices of most law schools, , that the ABA is part of “the resistance.” It is a call for Deep State sabotage. It is an endorsement of defying client confidences by leaking to the press. The opinion stands as both a partisan condemnation of the Trump Administration and deliberate effort to encourage attorney ethical misconduct in the name of “the greater good,” which today’s ABA believes is accomplished by opposing and foiling the Trump Presidency by any means necessary.

And, like the November video, the superfluous but provocative opinion has plausible deniability. After all, 524 only reiterates what is already in the Rules of Professional Conduct. It just says “it’s really, really, really important right now for you government lawyers to know this rule and follow it.” And why this particular rule? Why not Rule 1.6, about the duty of lawyers to keep their clients’ confidences, or Rule 1.7, about avoiding conflicts of interest?

‘Oh, gee, we don’t know. It’s always good to remind lawyers of the ethics rules, right?What’s the problem?”

The American Bar Association has always been politically biased, but it has now sunk to a level that forfeits any respect or justification for influence. It is a pure partisan activist organization that uses its pose as a non-partisan bar association as a cover. That is unethical. For such an organization to presume to issue any ethics opinions is grotesque.