It's almost autumn, and Trump attorney law licenses are falling like leaves

Do you remember Lin Wood, the Trump attorney who in December, 2020, accused Chief Justice John Roberts of raping and murdering children?  How about this one:  the very same Lin Wood accused Roberts of being responsible for the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in his sleep during a trip to a luxury hunting resort in Texas, a trip, incidentally, Roberts did not make with Scalia and his billionaire buddies. 

That’s not all.  In January of 2021, Wood alleged that child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who had died in his cell at the Manhattan Correctional Center, was instead alive and could back up his charges about Justice Roberts.  After the attack on the Capitol, Wood alleged that Vice President Pence, too, was a child molester and called for his death by firing squad.  In May of 2021, Wood and his friends Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn were rewarded for their insane blatherings by being invited to be keynote speakers at a gathering of QAnon fanatics in Dallas.

In November of 2020, a week after Joe Biden was declared winner of the presidential election, Wood filed suit in Georgia, naming himself as plaintiff, to overturn the election results in that state, seeking to block certification of the Georgia election results.  Later that month, a federal district judge appointed by Donald Trump threw out Wood’s lawsuit, finding it had “no basis in fact or law.”  Wood had alleged that Trump won the election with 70 percent of the vote, and made the evidence-free charge that a conspiracy of the Chinese Communist Party, aided by “international communists” and certain Republican officials, had stolen the election from Trump.  Wood appealed to the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals.  On December 5, the circuit court upheld the district court decision throwing out Wood’s lawsuit.  He then filed another lawsuit in a different federal court district seeking to stop the runoff election for Georgia’s two senate seats.  In his filing, Wood stated that the facts in his lawsuit were verified “under plenty of perjury” rather than the normal legal standard of “under penalty of perjury.”

Well, the State Bar in Georgia has finally caught up with Lin Wood.  Before a decision could be rendered in a disciplinary hearing, Wood surrendered his law license, calling himself “the second most persecuted person in America.”

Wood joins a list of other Trump attorneys who have been disciplined by bar associations around the country. Rudy Giuliani had his license to practice law suspended in New York, and a disciplinary hearing by the Washington D.C. bar unanimously recommended that Giuliani lose his license there, too.  Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who is one of Trump’s co-defendants in Georgia, was disciplined by the Colorado bar for her actions as Trump’s attorney in cases seeking to overturn the election of 2020.  Ellis has distinguished herself from other Trump attorneys, as well as from her co-defendants in Georgia, by announcing this week that she will not vote for Trump in 2024, because of Trump’s “malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Another one of Trump’s attorneys, John Eastman, who authored the fake elector plan that was supposed to confuse, delay or outright cancel the counting of electoral ballots on Jan. 6, is facing a disciplinary hearing by the California bar seeking to take away his law license.  Eastman is a defendant in the Georgia case against Trump and 17 others, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against Trump in Washington, D.C.  So is former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.  This week, he was sued for $1.4 million in unpaid legal bills by the law firm of Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, who said Giuliani had racked up $1.6 million in legal bills between November of 2019 and July of 2023 and paid only $214,000 of that amount.

In Michigan, a court ruled in 2021 that a lawsuit filed by Sidney “Bring the Kraken” Powell and Lin Wood and several other attorneys was “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” and had been “brought in bad faith and for improper purpose.”  The court sanctioned the attorneys and ordered Powell and Wood and the rest of them to pay $175,250 to the city of Detroit for lawyers’ fees and court costs and referred all the attorneys to their state bars for unethical conduct that could lead to disbarment.

Powell joined Wood in a second lawsuit filed in Georgia in November of 2020 against Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking a court to end the certification of the election results.  In Powell’s and Wood’s lawsuits in both Georgia and Michigan, the word “district” was misspelled in three different ways on the first pages of the lawsuits.  Misspelled words alone should be grounds for disbarment, especially when you consider that spell-check programs are included in the word processors, meaning that the spell-check suggestions, all three of them, would have had to be intentionally ignored in the legal filings, showing evidence of contempt of court.

It is not a good time to be a lawyer for Donald Trump, or even a lawyer for a lawyer for Donald Trump.  There is always the issue of whether you will get paid, of course, and on top of that, there is the issue of whether you will continue to be permitted to practice law and earn a living as a lawyer. 

Food for thought as certain members of various bars head into a year of trials, disbarment proceedings, and potential lawsuits that attorneys representing the likes of Trump and Giuliani and Powell and Eastman and the rest of them might be asked to file.  Lin Wood, at least, will be spared those risks, as he will never set foot in a courtroom again unless he is a defendant.