After the 2020 election, legal watchdogs, outraged at some of their colleagues, filed scores of ethics complaints against lawyers who used their skills in questionable ways to help former President Donald Trump stay in power.
And in the past few years, the groups have had some notable successes, securing judgments that have led to pro-Trump lawyers like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani having their law licenses deactivated.
Now one of these groups — the 65 Project — is taking a more proactive approach. Starting Thursday, the group’s organizers are planning to run advertisements in legal journals published in swing states, reminding lawyers that they are ethically barred from bringing false claims on behalf of any client.
“Don’t risk your law license by joining an effort to subvert democracy,” one of the ads says. “We — and the public — are watching.”
The ads, which are initially set to appear in both print and online in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, will be coming out just as Republicans and Democrats alike are gearing up for what could be an exceptionally bitter legal fight over the election.
Democrats are expecting an aggressive Republican effort to challenge voters, rules and, possibly, the results of the race. In preparation, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has assembled an expansive legal team of hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers meant to be a bulwark against multiple certification battles and mass voter challenges.
Michael Teter, the managing director of the 65 Project, said he hoped the group’s ads would have a “deterrent effect” on any lawyers who might be inclined to take part in such efforts in a way that violated legal codes of ethics.
“Lawyers should know they’re risking their law licenses if they try to overturn free and fair elections,” he said.
A small army of lawyers went to work for Trump four years ago, helping him to launch an increasingly dubious series of attempts to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden.
Some filed lawsuits of questionable merit that claimed the race had been marred by widespread fraud or had been rigged by a conspiracy of plotters that included voting machine companies, the Chinese Community Party and George Soros, a Democratic financier.
Others mapped out plans to create slates of electors that falsely claimed Trump had won the race in states that were actually won by Biden. The plan was intended to culminate Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump wanted his own vice president, Mike Pence, to use the fake electors as a pretense to delay the certification of the election or to throw the race his way at a proceeding at the Capitol that day.
For taking part in efforts like this, many pro-Trump lawyers have paid a steep price.
Eastman and Giuliani, for example, were not only barred from practicing law because of the work they did for Trump in 2020. They were also both indicted in separate criminal cases in Georgia and Arizona, where they stand accused of conspiring with the former president to overturn the results of the race. They have both pleaded not guilty, and Eastman is fighting the deactivation of his law license.
Some pro-Trump lawyers, like Sidney Powell, were sanctioned by judges for filing lawsuits advancing a conspiracy theory that voting machines built by Dominion Voting Systems had been used to rig the election against Trump. Jenna Ellis, who was part of a team of lawyers who presented his fraud claims at legislative hearings in swing states, settled a disciplinary measure against her by publicly admitting that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts when she claimed that widespread voting fraud had led to Trump’s defeat.
The 65 Project takes its name from its tally of 65 lawsuits pro-Trump lawyers filed to try to overturn the 2020 results. It describes itself as a bipartisan group and receives funding from large grant-making foundations, Teter said. Its advisory board includes a former chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court, Christine Durham, and Paul Rosenzweig, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security.
The group’s advertisements seek to capitalize on the penalties that pro-Trump lawyers faced for their work after the last presidential election. One of the ads bluntly states the potential consequences.
“Don’t lose your law license because of Trump,” it says.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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