The Virginia State Bar is the latest watchdog to turn tail and run rather than deal with the crime spree that is President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
The bar, which theoretically investigates ethics complaints against attorneys and can discipline or disbar them, decided it didn’t really want to investigate one particular attorney: the not-at-all-illustrious Lindsey Halligan.
Why not? Well, because a complaint about Halligan potentially lying to the grand jury to nab indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James is somehow not an ethics issue but a problem for the courts.
“Whether criminal indictments were obtained through material misrepresentations of fact and done for political purposes falls within the authority of the court to determine and not this office,” the Virginia bar states.
Lindsey Halligan
So basically it says that it could initiate an investigation only after a court finds that Halligan lied and issues sanctions. What about potential violations of federal laws or agency regulations? Well, that’s “a matter for determination by federal law enforcement.”
When will the bar rouse itself to get involved? Well, it might feel like it “if a lawyer is charged with and convicted of a crime.”
These excuses are, in technical legal terms, some bullshit.
First, the bar ignores that the complaint wasn’t just about Halligan’s unethical behavior in securing those indictments, but it also covers her out-of-the-blue Signal texts to Lawfare’s Anna Bower, which was a textbook example of a prosecutor making extrajudicial statements about a case.
And the complaint didn’t just allege that she violated DOJ regulations but also the Local Rules for the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia and the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct.
The complaint also alleged that Halligan violated the ethical rule that prohibits lawyers from engaging in a “deliberately wrongful act that reflects adversely on the lawyer’s honest, trustworthiness or fitness to practice law.”
That’s thanks to Halligan setting her Signal chats to auto-delete, which violates the Federal Records Act.
You’ll note that the little excuse list from the bar does not address those violations at all. That’s because the bar knows full well that its literal job is to investigate violations of the rules of professional conduct:
Within the VSB, the Office of Bar Counsel reviews all complaints it receives to determine whether a lawyer might have violated one or more Rules. If a Rule might have been violated, the VSB investigates the situation.
Except when it doesn’t, apparently.
Part of why this is so galling is that the bar is well aware of how other mechanisms for controlling DOJ attorneys have already fallen apart. And saying that an attorney whipping up a prosecution based on lies isn’t an ethical issue unless and until a court throws out the charges is absurd. It robs ethics requirements of any teeth and requires a complainant to basically just wait out the court process, which can take years.
Related | How Trump’s DOJ is pushing the limits of the statute of limitations
This is a particular issue for DOJ attorneys, as the department has already made clear it has no interest in complying with anything that would rein in its attorneys.
Indeed, after the court ruled that Halligan was not legally in her job, one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first actions was to get the Office of Legal Counsel to weigh in, saying that Halligan should still get to sign court filings as a “special attorney.”
The bar is also well aware that, when courts attempt to sanction DOJ attorneys for unethical conduct, the administration goes scorched-earth to ensure it doesn’t happen, like with Judge James Boasberg’s inquiry into whether those who defied his order to return deportation flights were in contempt.
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.
We also have clear evidence that, while serving as a government attorney, Emil Bove told attorneys to ignore that order, which would typically constitute an ethics violation. But the Trump administration made sure to ram Bove’s nomination through the very pliable Senate before he could be questioned about it.
There’s no world where DOJ attorneys are going to face any consequences a court tries to impose, and the Virginia State Bar knows it.
In Florida, the bar similarly declined to address complaints against Bondi, saying it will not “investigate or prosecute sitting officers appointed under the U.S. Constitution while they are in office.”
The Florida Supreme Court is also not interested in dealing with Bondi’s ethical nightmare.
None of this bodes well for complaints to other state bars. The Legal Accountability Center has asked the bar in Washington, D.C., to investigate Ed Martin, the special attorney tasked with handling “mortgage fraud,” which is really just a catchall term for anything he can dredge up to attack Trump’s enemies.
Martin is a walking, talking ethics violation—for everything from refusing to investigate or prosecute Republicans to making improper extrajudicial statements. But if his luck holds, none of that will matter to the bar.
The state of play right now is that the courts can’t provide relief from these ethical nightmares because it just results in endless lawfare from the DOJ or help from Trump’s pals on the Supreme Court.
Great system we have here.
