‘There is no question that there is a political bias in the legal profession that skews dramatically to the left,’ one expert says.
A California bar court judge ruled in late March that John Eastman should be disbarred for helping President Donald Trump challenge the outcome of the 2020 election.
Before the California Supreme Court reviews the case, Mr. Eastman asked a judge to pause the order prohibiting him from practicing law, so he could fund his defense in the criminal case brought against President Trump and his attorneys in Georgia.
Jeffrey Clark, who also tried to help President Trump, is facing a similar disbarment hearing in Washington. The focal point is a “proof of concept” letter he drafted for President Trump in December 2020 that would have asked top Georgia officials to investigate alleged voter fraud in the state.
Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman are the latest attorneys to face backlash from their profession over their actions. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giulliani’s license was suspended in June 2021.
Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis each have been sentenced in the Georgia case after making plea deals. Lawrence Joseph, Julia Haller, and Brandon Johnson, who worked on President Trump’s post election challenges in battleground states, are also facing disciplinary proceedings in Washington.
Other conservative attorneys have faced their own forms of professional repercussions and threats.
Christopher Crowley, a former prosecutor from Fort Myers, Florida, could be suspended by the Florida Bar after an ethics complaint was filed in 2020 for political statements he made about an opponent in a Republican primary for a state attorney election.
William Brown was fired from a prominent law firm in New Jersey for making political remarks about the glorification of violence in hip-hop and militant forms of Islam in a December 2023 LinkedIn post.
James Bopp Jr. was subject to an ethics complaint after he asked a judge to recuse himself while representing Michael Gableman in an investigation into Wisconsin’s election commission.
Patrick Leduc was harassed and criticized for representing one of the first defendants to go before a judge in the indictments related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
And Timothy Parlatore faced public outcry for briefly representing President Trump in his Florida classified documents case and the one brought by DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith in Washington, D.C.
These attorneys have expressed to The Epoch Times a fear that legal proceedings and the legal profession as a whole are increasingly used to pursue lawyers on the right more than lawyers on the left.
Ty Clevenger, a civil rights attorney from Texas, said the alleged politicization of lawyer disciplinary actions sends the wrong signals.
By Jacob Burg
