I Hope Rudy Giuliani Recovers Sufficiently To Read This: A Legal Ethicist Neatly Explains What’s Wrong With Bar’s Punishing Trump’s “Stop the Steal” Attorneys

Rudy Giuliani is in critical condition in a hospital today, and it reminded me to finish this post.

Giuliani is one of the lawyers hit with bar association discipline for representing Donald Trump in the wake of the highly suspicious 2020 Presidential election, or perhaps I should say the way they represented Trump and his contention that the election was “stolen” or “rigged.” I have written two posts about the D.C. Bar and New York Sate Bar’s proceedings against Rudy here and especially here. My conclusion in then latter piece, in part. :

“This case has been the subject of much debate by my legal ethicist colleagues of late, with a depressing near-consensus that Rudy is getting what he deserves. This is because, I detect, the vast majority of lawyers cannot see through their political biases and Trump hate. At the most simple level,… contrary to the Court’s certitude, all of the evidence is not in, though the claim that there was widespread election fraud and that the election was “stolen” has for many months been pronounced “a lie” by Democrats and the mainstream media with suspicious vigor. While the opinion makes a convincing case that many of Giuliani’s statements, including some made to courts and government bodies, were careless, sloppy, badly sourced, unprofessional and wrong, it cannot know at this point that his (or Trump’s) general claim is false. If it is not false, then raising doubts among the public cannot be called dangerous to the public. It is more dangerous to keep opinions, arguments and ideas from the public’s awareness “for their own good.”…Giuliani, like so many other victims of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is being punished by a double standard predicated on the hatred of Donald Trump. That’s unethical.”

Esteemed law professor Brad Wendel, who belongs to the same, almost totally anti-Trump legal ethics specialist association that I do, has published a contrarian analysis following California’s disbarment of John Eastman (above), who was one of the principal architects, along with Kenneth Chesebro (who was disbarred in New York after pleading guilty in Georgia to charges of election interference), of President Trump’s legal assault on the 2020 election. There are plenty of tells in Prof. Wendel’s essay that he is far from a Trump admirer (for example, he refers to the “scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”) However, he writes,