Commentary: Crooked lawyers were crucial to Trump’s Jan. 6 plot. We clearly need to reform the profession
Over the last two weeks, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, three lawyers central to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, pleaded guilty in the Georgia racketeering case against the former president and 18 co-defendants. All admitted significantly lesser crimes than charged and escaped prison time.
Prosecutors may be more interested in Trump himself, but the lenient plea deals fail to comport with the culpability of these and other lawyers in Trump’s plot against the election. Eight attorneys were indicted in the Georgia case, and the federal indictment of Trump in the Jan. 6 plot includes five attorneys as unindicted co-conspirators, unnamed but identifiable as Powell, Chesebro, Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark.
Lawyers weren’t in Trump’s plot; they devised and enabled it. Lawyers developed the strategies, manufactured a faux constitutional crisis and manipulated legal requirements in the effort to keep Trump in power and give his attempted coup the trappings of legality and legitimacy.
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