When Georgia prosecutors accused former President Donald Trump of election interference in August, the outsized influence of lawyers in the alleged conspiracy veered sharply back into focus.
The indictment in Fulton County Superior Court charges 19 defendants with violations of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations—RICO—Act, and 40 other charges.
Eight defendants named in the sprawling criminal case are lawyers: including Rudolph Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro, Ray Smith III, Robert Cheeley and John Eastman. Giuliani and Eastman are charged in the indictment with conspiring with the former president to push a slate of pro-Trump electors from several swing states, including Georgia, in the failed bid to reverse his 2020 election defeat. Chesebro is accused of writing several memos to support the plot to have the electors certify that Trump, not Democrat Joe Biden, was the winner.
On Tuesday, Aug. 22, Eastman’s mugshot and fingerprints were taken at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta. Two days later, he was back in the austere surroundings of the disciplinary courtroom in Los Angeles, seated between his attorneys, with just a few people watching from the gallery. When his disciplinary trial began in June, he was just fighting for his professional career. Now facing criminal liability, much more is at stake than just his law license.
The criminal case could overshadow his bar trial. But Michael J. Teter, the managing director of the 65 Project, a bipartisan group formed by members of the legal community to file complaints against Trump lawyers for professional misconduct, says disciplinary action is important so the same conduct “does not become part of the political arsenal in the future.”
“Lawyers take an oath, and they have a responsibility that’s not just to their client but to the larger legal community, to the profession and to democracy. When you have lawyers who are working against the rule of law [it’s important] to bring a comprehensive system of accountability,” Teter says.
65 Project Advisory Board member Renee Knake Jefferson adds that there also is a deterrent effect in disciplinary trials and says they are important for public confidence in the legal profession, which is self-regulated.
“It’s important that there are consequences in that regulatory process when a lawyer engages in this kind of behavior,” says Jefferson, a law professor and legal ethics expert at the University of Houston.
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