Media reports display an increasing number of disciplinary proceedings against lawyers caught in the former guy's black hole.
One of the former guy's lawyers is suspended from practicing law in New York.
And then the same former lawyer is suspended from practicing law in Washington, D.C.
Elsewhere, other former lawyers of the former guy are neck-deep in sanctions hearings, it is reported.
In the meantime, lawyers still in the department of justice have continued to conduct an operation designed to keep one of Bill Barr's memorandums a secret so that the public cannot see it. That memorandum reportedly has to do with why Bill Barr decided not to prosecute the former guy.
Some say Barr's decision was made before the memorandum was written, parenthetically. But that has little to do with our concern today. Or does it?
As reported here earlier, the federal judge presiding over the memo-as-secret litigation found that lawyers in the department of justice had been "disingenuous" and that their testimony was "not worthy of credence" in the course of representing the former guy's former attorney general's position.
The department's response? Did they investigate the behavior that draws sanctions in other places? Did they at least reprimand the lawyers and perhaps even chide them for bringing the department into disrepute?
No. The department appealed the judge's order to make the memo public. They obviously hope that if the judge's order is overturned then they can say that the judge's findings of misconduct are overturned as well.
You and I know it does not work that way.
The judge's findings remain. What the lawyers did, they did. And what they did was misrepresent things to the court, that's what the findings are, not simply opinions and allegations. Findings.
And making misrepresentations to the court has got the attention of bar associations across the nation. No bar association has ever condoned this sort of behavior. To the contrary. The bar associations that have already looked at lawyer-as-misrepresenting-to-the-court have suspended the lawyers in question from the practice of law in their courts.
Why is this not so in the department whose name is justice?
I served on a grievance committee myself for years. Bar associations only rarely discipline lawyers and even when they do, the discipline they impose is hardly every suspension or disbarment. This is not to say that any such discipline should be visited on the lawyers whom a federal judge found to be "disingenuous" and whose testimony the judge found "not worthy of credence."
I do ask again, why is the department of so-called justice not even investigating?
Why is the department instead spending its time in distracting public attention by appealing to keep Barr's secret memorandum, well, secret?
Bill Barr photo by Alexander Drago / Reuters.
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