On the eve of the US election, lawyers are fighting over allegations of ethics violations

After Donald Trump tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat, a rights group was formed to fight the lawyers who helped his doomed effort, filing more than 80 ethics complaints against them.

With Trump once again the Republican nominee for President of the United States, his allies have fired back at the group, dubbed Project 65. A pro-Trump nonprofit known as America First Legal has accused Project 65 of engaging in left-leaning efforts to intimidate conservative lawyers, filing a bar complaint against Project 65’s lead lawyer, Michael Teter, earlier this week. The Oct. 28 complaint said Teter targeted attorneys “solely based on their representation of a client that was not in favor.”

Teter said America First Legal’s move shows “fear among those who want to use the courts to undermine democracy.” A representative for the body that hears allegations of attorney misconduct in Utah, where Teter is licensed, declined to comment on the complaint against Teter.

Allegations of misconduct at the duels underscore the critical role lawyers are once again playing as another election looms. Some lawyers involved in Trump’s failed 2020 bid to stay in office, which was based on false claims of widespread fraud, have lost their licenses or faced charges.

Trump said he can’t lose this time unless Democrats cheat. That raises the possibility that he will challenge the results if Vice President Kamala Harris is declared the winner after the Nov. 5 election.

Project 65, named after the number of unsuccessful lawsuits it says were filed to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden’s victory, says its mission is to prevent lawyers from making false claims about the election. In September, the group pledged to spend at least $100,000 advertising in legal journals in host countries, warning lawyers not to risk losing their law licenses by helping Trump.

America First Legal, a nonprofit founded in 2021 by former Trump White House aide Stephen Miller, sharply criticized the ad on its website announcing its complaint against Teter. The group is increasingly focused on this year’s election after previously filing lawsuits challenging diversity and migration policies.

“Seeking the personal destruction and financial ruin of another lawyer — simply because of a client he represented or a case he took — goes against … the letter and spirit of the law governing attorneys,” America First Legal’s executive director. director Gene Hamilton said in a statement announcing the complaint against Teter. A spokesman for the group did not respond to Reuters’ request for further comment.

Among America First Legal’s election-related activities this year was the filing of a lawsuit in August to compel precincts in the embattled state of Arizona to investigate about 44,000 voters — about 1 percent of the state’s total. – who were allowed to register without providing proof of citizenship. A judge on Oct. 11 declined to rule in favor of America First Legal ahead of the election, which the group is challenging.

DISCIPLINE AND DISMISSAL

Of the attorneys targeted by Project 65 between 2022 and 2023, at least four were disciplined, state bar and court records show. At least three complaints were dismissed by disciplinary boards in Georgia and Pennsylvania, Teter said.

A spokesman for the State Bar of Georgia confirmed that the two complaints were dismissed after an investigation. The office of Pennsylvania’s chief disciplinary attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At least 12 lawyers filed by Project 65 have not been disciplined and have been re-involved in lawsuits related to voting on behalf of Trump allies, according to a Reuters review of the group’s website and court records.

“It’s very disappointing that the bar associations spend so much time trying to review, investigate and conclude these cases, but I don’t see it as a hindrance to our work,” Teter said.

America First Legal received $44.4 million in contributions in 2022, the most recent year for which its tax returns are publicly available. Project 65’s annual budgets are not available to the public.

Neither America First Legal nor Project 65 disclose the sources of their funding. Teter said the funding for Project 65 comes from “individuals and organizations who have an interest in ensuring that the legal system is not used or abused to undermine democracy.”

“PHANTOM FEARS OF FOREIGN CRIMINALS”

In the run-up to Tuesday’s election, Trump and his allies filled courts across the country with lawsuits seeking to change rules and clean up voter rolls to make sure, they say, ballots are counted properly and people don’t vote illegally.

Overall, the legal blitz is winding down, with Trump allies suffering at least 11 court defeats in battleground states over the past three weeks, court records show.

But they also had some victories. A Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday extended the deadline for some voters to request a mail-in ballot after the Trump campaign alleged that some voters who wanted ballots were improperly turned away.

And the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated the removal from voter rolls in Virginia of about 1,600 people who Republicans say were not U.S. citizens, even though President Joe Biden’s administration said those affected were actual citizens. Virginia voters often lean Democratic, even though the state’s current governor and attorney general are Republicans.

Among the Republican setbacks is a lawsuit filed in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of six Republican congressmen by attorney Eric Kaardal, who sued in 2020 to try to block the certification of Biden’s victory, prompting a federal judge’s referral to the ethics committee and a Project 65 complaint.

Kaardal’s lawsuit this year sought to change overseas voter verification procedures that Kaardal said were vulnerable to fraud.

On Oct. 18, before a skeptical judge in a Harrisburg courtroom, he argued that Iranians could cast fake ballots abroad if the rules weren’t tightened. A little more than a week later, U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner dismissed the case, ruling that the plaintiffs “cannot rely on phantom fears of foreign official crimes to justify their negligence.”

Asked for comment on the dismissal, Kaardal provided Reuters with a statement from the Election Research Institute — a conservative nonprofit whose attorney Karen DiSalvo litigated the case with him — saying the plaintiffs were considering an appeal, which DiSalvo confirmed.

JUDGE’S DIRECTION

Kaardal’s recent court defeat comes four years after he challenged Congress to recognize Biden’s victory, a lawsuit that the presiding judge found “filled with baseless allegations of fraud and frivolous legal claims.” It referred Kaardal to the Washington, D.C., panel that hears allegations of professional misconduct without making a recommendation on whether he should be disciplined.

According to a Dec. 28, 2023 letter Kaardal provided to Reuters, the Washington disciplinary committee declined to take action.

Project 65 also filed an ethics complaint against Kaardal in his home state of Minnesota over the 2020 lawsuit and three similar ones.

The director of the Minnesota Office of Legal Professional Responsibility, which investigates complaints against attorneys in the state, declined to comment on the complaint.

Kaardal, who has twice successfully argued election issues before the U.S. Supreme Court, has denied any professional misconduct in any of his cases. “During a career spanning approximately 32 years, there have been no disciplinary complaints against me,” Kaardal said in an Oct. 24 email to Reuters, which found no evidence to the contrary.

“ATTEMPT TO INTIMIDATE”

In addition to Kaardal, other lawyers Project 65 has filed complaints against include attorney Kenneth Klukowski, who the group says violated legal ethics rules in 2020 when he allegedly helped former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clarke try to block the certification of Biden’s victory in several states .

The DC Bar Association did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the complaint against Klukowski. In August, the Washington Law Commission recommended that Clark’s law license be suspended for two years. Clark denies violating the rules of legal ethics.

Ahead of the upcoming election, Klukowski is back in the game, representing the pro-Trump policy institute America First Policy in a fight against Biden’s 2021 executive order to increase voter participation. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Another attorney, William Bradley Carver, represented the Republican National Committee in election-related cases in 2024 after filing a complaint from Project 65 for being sworn in as a Trump voter in Georgia, even though Biden won in southern state in 2020.

On Dec. 27, 2022, the Georgia State Bar notified Teter and Carver that it had dismissed the complaint in part because Carver was acting in his personal capacity and not as an attorney when he was sworn in as a selectman, according to Carver’s letter provided to Reuters.

A representative of the bar confirmed that the complaint was rejected.

In an Oct. 31 email, Carver told Reuters that Teter’s attack on me was “a pure attempt to intimidate me and discourage young lawyers from representing the Republican Party. This is dangerous.”

Teter described the Project 65 advisory board as bipartisan, noting that it includes former lawyers in Republican administrations.

“Politics doesn’t come into it,” Teter said in a telephone interview on October 31. “Abusing our legal system is the premise of our work.”