The left is upping the lawfare against conservatives, even attempting to prosecute them, as they proceed to indict former President Donald Trump. The 65 Project was specifically created to disbar conservative election attorneys. Any election attorney who dares to get involved in litigation regarding the botched 2020 presidential election, or other elections like Arizona’s 2022 midterm where Republican voters were disenfranchised, risks losing their license to practice law due to left-wing dominated state bars.
The 65 Project filed a legal ethics complaint against Trump’s former attorney Jenna Ellis in her home state of Colorado a year ago, demanding discipline — including possible disbarment — for public statements she made defending Trump and his efforts to combat election fraud.
Earlier this month, Ellis quietly settled the case. She admitted to spreading “misrepresentations” “with at least a reckless state of mind.” For these concessions, which are very damaging to Trump and his cause, Ellis escaped with a censure for professional misconduct from the Colorado courts. Based on her tweets, Ellis appears to now be leaning towards Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump for president in 2024, although a year ago she offered to represent Disney against DeSantis.
Her censure deal required her to say she had misled Americans with statements such as, “The election was stolen and Trump won by a landslide.” And, “The proper and true victor . . . is Donald Trump.” These are statements most Republican voters believe are true, according to polls. A Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Republicans believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
Immediately before the censure was announced, Ellis tweeted that Kari Lake was a “grifter” for appealing her alleged gubernatorial loss in Arizona. While there’s only a slim chance any judges will dare rule that there was voter suppression since it affected Republicans, Lake’s supporters would be devastated if she dropped the battle to expose corruption, especially since more information continues to come out, including an exit poll which found that an astounding 8 percent more voters chose her over Katie Hobbs.
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Ellis’ settlement would have been quietly swept under the rug but for an article by former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas on his new and fast-growing Substack column “Resurgence” (which I previously wrote about, subscribe here). In an article titled “The Craven Surrender of Jenna Ellis,” Thomas exposed how Ellis had caved to leftist state bar fanatics to save her career at the expense of denying the “serious, election-affecting irregularities in 2020.” She destroyed her own credibility by admitting “making numerous ‘misrepresentations’ for ‘selfish’ reasons,” as well as the ability of other Trump attorneys to challenge the 2020 elections, even in public interviews. Thomas tore apart Ellis’ attempts to “finesse her surrender” with “spin control” worthy of “RINO politicians.”
Thomas told me (I served in his office over a decade ago as a deputy Maricopa County prosecutor and Maricopa County Elections attorney) he wrote the article on Ellis because he suspected nobody else would. “She was just going to fly under the radar and get away with it,” he said. (You can read Thomas’ own story of fighting these same state bar maniacs here.)
Other Trump election attorneys responded publicly on Twitter to Thomas’ article. One was Sidney Powell, the courageous attorney instrumental in getting the DOJ to end their rotten persecution of General Michael Flynn. Having only recently beaten back attempts to disbar her in Texas for her work for Trump in the 2020 elections, Powell tweeted, “The very future of our adversary system is at stake. @JennaEllisEsq should not have cratered to pressure. By conceding, she undermined the Truth, the law, and herself. It’s like a false guilty plea coerced by threats. It hurts everyone.”
In his article, Thomas praised former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, the distinguished constitutional scholar at the Claremont Institute, for not copping a plea to the bar complaints against them. “Their bravery is inspiring,” he wrote. The California State Bar has announced its intention to seek Eastman’s disbarment based on his obviously good-faith attempts to give legal advice to a besieged Trump in late 2020, after Trump’s establishment attorneys and advisers had deserted him.
Eastman tweeted about the “terrific article,” “I agree wholeheartedly. As free citizens, we need to withstand Big Brother’s attempts to force us to accept falsehoods. 2 + 2 does not equal 5, and unlike Winston Smith in 1984, we must be able to say so.”
As one of the early targets of the left’s cancel culture in the legal system, I too had an offer to merely admit I’d made a mistake when the State Bar of Arizona came after me. Thomas and I went after corrupt Maricopa County Supervisors and judges for racketeering, but they filed bar complaints against us and got the left-wing bar to go along with them. I refused multiple times to cave in and settle for an admission of error as punishment, so they suspended my law license for six months. Now, state bars have no slam-dunk precedent from my disciplinary case (or Thomas’) that they can use against other attorneys in the future who try to take on similar corruption.
It’s a Pyrrhic victory for Ellis, since she will continue to have the state bar hanging over her head, ready to pounce if she dares to say anything “controversial” again. The settlement serves her interests but not those of MAGA. Increasingly, zealous advocacy of a client’s interests is allowed for criminal defendants and causes of the left, but few others. The right’s lawyers, if they dare speak at all, must stick to the most humdrum of legal theories and narratives, or they risk professional sanctions or even bogus prosecution.
Caving into the left-wing fascists is the last thing powerful figures on the right should be doing if we ever hope to stop election fraud and legal corruption. The 65 Project is currently going after a long list of attorneys on the right and Ellis’s surrender will be used against them as precedent.
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