Trump Lawyer's Likely Disbarment Complicates Georgia Defense – Bloomberg Law
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By Maia Spoto
The thoroughness of a California judge’s ruling and the state high court’s slim record of rejecting disbarment recommendations make it highly unlikely that Donald Trump attorney John Eastman will win his fight to keep his California law license, legal ethics attorneys and scholars say.
State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland’s decision, issued late Wednesday, may also complicate the lawyer’s legal defense against criminal charges of election interference in Georgia.
Eastman’s comments and writings after Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election—particularly the attorney’s assertion that then-Vice President Mike Pence could delay counting 2020 presidential election electoral votes—held “reckless disregard for the truth,” Roland said in her 128-page ruling.
The former Chapman University law professor will be placed on involuntary inactive enrollment within three days of the ruling.
“This is a dramatic step toward Eastman’s disbarment,” said UCLA legal ethics professor Scott Cummings via email, adding that “the extensive factual record upon which the State Bar Court rests its recommendation will be hard to overcome.”
Already a prominent conservative legal scholar, Eastman was one of the former president’s legal advocates as he sought to overturn the election results both in court and out, attempting to persuade Pence and his lawyers that the vice president had the power to alter the Jan. 6, 2021 electoral vote count, or reject those cast by electors from key battleground states. He also joined Trump and former New York City mayor and prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani in the rally at the Ellipse in front of the White House during which the ex-president’s supporters were urged to march on the US Capitol during that vote count.
Disciplinary charges were filed again Eastman at the state bar court in January 2023. He, Trump, Giuliani, and others were indicted in August by Fulton County, Ga., prosecutor Fani Willis. All three men have pleaded not guilty.
A California federal judge last year separately found Trump, Eastman, and other Trump allies likely engaged in criminal activity after the 2020 election.
Eastman plans to take his California case to the Review Department, which handles appeals for the State Bar Court, according to a statement provided by his attorney, Randall Miller.
This process will likely take about a year to conclude, ethics attorney David Carr said. The California Supreme Court will make the final decision on his disbarment, regardless of whether the state’s high court takes up his case for review.
Carr said he could count “on one hand” the number of times the state’s high court has accepted review of a state bar court ruling brought by a respondent in the past 30 years—and in these cases, the court has never overturned a disbarment recommendation.
Including outcomes other than disbarment, which can effectively end a legal career, the California Supreme Court has adopted existing discipline recommendations “98 or 99 percent of the time,” Carr said.
Eastman’s odds of appellate success are further diminished by the fact that Roland’s ruling is based in “very well-settled law,” he said.
“There’s no great issue of law flapping in the breeze here,” Carr said.
Eastman maintains that his actions were based on reliable research and, as a “zealous advocate,” constitute “the essence of what lawyers do,” according to the statement released by his attorney.
Roland rejected Eastman’s “zealous advocate” arguments in her ruling, saying while lawyers should be a strong advocate for their clients, they’re still limited by ethical and legal boundaries.
The ruling addresses a “grey area” in the boundaries of legal advocacy, said Ellen Pansky, with Pansky Markle Attorneys at Law, who defends lawyers before the State Bar Court.
“The court seems to have concluded that by going beyond justifying the client’s asserted position, and by participating in the presentation of actual falsehoods, Eastman became a collaborator,” Pansky said via email.
The State Bar Court’s 33-day trial and ruling represent part of a “new and more aggressive approach” by the State Bar to address attorney misconduct, brought into the spotlight by accusations that the now-disbarred and indicted plaintiffs’ lawyer Thomas Girardi stole millions from clients, said Kenneth P. White, a founding partner at Brown White & Osborn LLP.
Prompted by the scandal over the state bar largely turning aside complaints about Girardi’s conduct, California in August began requiring attorneys to report other lawyers for misconduct, as long as reporting won’t material prejudice or damage to the interests of a client of the lawyer’s firm.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed an addition to the rule into law in October, requiring that attorneys also report other lawyers for seditious conspiracy, insurrection, or treason. California Senate Judiciary Chairman Tom Umberg (D), who wrote the legislation, said the Eastman case was the reason for including that addition.
The findings of fact in Roland’s ruling shouldn’t have any legal effect on the Georgia proceedings, White said. However, they will likely “embolden the DA in Georgia to think that other people interpret the events the same way she does,” he said.
Former Manhattan federal prosecutor David N. Kelley agreed.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to study this, and not knowing Georgia evidentiary rules, it is highly unlikely this ruling would be admissible in the Georgia case as evidence of his guilt of the charges in Georgia,” Kelley said via email. “I think it is like to provide a bit of a roadmap to prosecutors in Georgia who may use this opinion to identify witnesses and possible theories to prove their case.”
It almost guarantees Eastman won’t take the stand in Georgia, said trial lawyer Ritchie Berger, who leads litigation for Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew, P.C., via email. Eastman did testify in his own defense during the state bar court proceedings.
“Normally a defendant in his position wouldn’t anyway but Eastman is so obviously arrogant he may well have decided to overrule his lawyer’s advice on that,” Berger said. “He can’t now unless he definitely wants to becomes a martyr for his cause.”
— With assistance from Joyce E. Cutler in San Francisco.
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