Now that he’s out of office, this kind of thing isn’t a horror movie anymore. It’s a slapstick comedy. (Well, a comedy with horror elements, since there are still millions of Americans who wanted this to keep on rolling. Or maybe a horror movie with comedy elements. Basically, we’re in the Scream franchise now.)
Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.
"How the hell did Sidney get in the building?" White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president.
President Trump's private schedule hadn't included appointments for Powell or the others: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they'd come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.
As Powell and the others entered the Oval Office that evening, Herschmann — a wealthy business executive and former partner at Kasowitz Benson & Torres who'd been pulled out of quasi-retirement to advise Trump — quietly slipped in behind them.
The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.
Read the whole thing, for it is absolutely amazing, even by Trump White House standards. (Also, it’s pretty easy to narrow down who may have leaked all of this to Axios.)
White House staff had spent weeks poring over the evidence underlying hundreds of affidavits and other claims of fraud promoted by Trump allies like Powell. The team had done the due diligence and knew the specific details of what was being alleged better than anybody. Time and time again, they found, Powell's allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny.
But Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that Dominion had illegally flipped the vote.
Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: "So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?"
There’s been some controversy about whether people who worked in the Trump Administration should be allowed to profit from their participation through book deals. My standard rule for that kind of thing is, if you don’t want to read it, don’t buy it. Also, I think there’s a difference in culpability between say, Steven Miller and his fellow child-separation shock troops, and the second assistant undersecretary for traffic lights in the Department of Transportation.
I suspect we’ll see a lot of ass-covering from Trump Administration officials in the coming years, with mid-tier functionaries and even disgruntled former cabinet members falling over themselves to say none of it was their fault. All of these books should be taken with a grain of salt. But I think they will have some absolutely amazing stories to tell.
I want these people to tear each other apart in public, and illustrate just how freaking insane the former Administration was. I plan to read as many of these self-serving memoirs as possible.
Of course, I’ll borrow them from the library. I never said I was going to give them my money.
Defending lawyers who take on unpopular clients is becoming a running theme for this newsletter, and here’s an example from The Old Country:
In a bizarre screed for the university newspaper, the chair of the Oxford “LGBTQ+” society, Ellie Redpath, demands the resignation of Magdalen College President, Dinah Rose. What has Dinah Rose done? Ms Rose is a QC, (a barrister, or an advocate for our overseas readers) and is representing the government of the Cayman Islands in their court challenge to same-sex marriage. It was originally imposed on the British Overseas Territory by the UK Court, then overturned on appeal, and now it has gone to the Privy Council. An it will be Dinah Rose QC in the hot seat.
Now, it is important to add that Ms Rose did not choose the case. An important element of the British justice system is that a barrister cannot turn down a case. This is called ‘the cab rank‘ system. To turn down a case other than on specific and limited grounds, would be considered professional misconduct for which a lawyer can be disbarred. This robust penalty is in place to ensure that no one, however unpopular, or seemingly guilty, has to face a British court without competent legal representation.
It is very much part and parcel of the fundamental right to equal access to goods and services. If you think not getting a cake baked is a big deal, imagine being an innocent person accused of a heinous crime and not being able to obtain legal representation because of presumed guilt and public outrage.
But back to Ellie Redpath’s bizarre and rambling article. She says she accepts that the ‘cab rank’ principle applies but thinks that nonetheless – while accepting that the views of her clients are not the views of Dinah Rose’s – that this makes Rose unfit to be President of Magdalen College as she poses a risk to the welfare of “LGBTQ+ and BAME” students.
Quite why she thinks this has anything to do with black and ethnic minority students is puzzling. She makes no effort to explain: perhaps it is just standard SJW practice to throw in an innuendo of racism for good measure. This is ironic since the majority of Cayman Islanders, including its head of government are in fact, in British terms, ‘BAME’ and it is they who are opposing same-sex marriage as incompatible with social attitudes on the island. This Redpath does not address, or even acknowledge. Oddly, students usually oppose the imposition of Western ideas of gay rights on other societies on the grounds of ‘cultural imperialism‘ so at least we can be grateful they’ve moved on from that.
Her argument is basically this: “We have been told what the case is and we appreciate that logically, rationally, and legally, it makes sense and our feelings don’t. But despite the fact that we understand the situation we still feel ‘a bit icky’ about it and our feelings should be the only things that matter. Therefore Rose must be fired even though she has done nothing wrong – and we understand and accept she has done nothing wrong. We’ just don’t like the way it is.”
It wasn’t too long ago that lawyers who represented gay-rights activists found themselves the object of scorn and outrage. Just as constitutional guarantees of free speech allowed members of an unpopular minority to express their beliefs, access to the legal system allowed them to press their claims forward.
The tide has turned dramatically in recent years, and now the same people who benefited from these classical liberal principles want to pull up the drawbridge and ensure that the bad people don’t have these rights. (It is the left-wing equivalent of people who took advantage of social programs to get a leg up in society, but now complain about “welfare bums” sponging off the taxpayers.)
Ironically, one of the lawyers who courageously represented gay-rights activists was none other than…Dinah Rose, QC:
Ms Rose said that pressure was “now being put on me to cease to act in this case, on the basis of threats of adverse publicity both for me and the college”.
But were she to succumb to it, she would “commit an act of serious professional misconduct”.
It was, she said, “a long-standing principle, essential to the maintenance of access to justice and the rule of law that a lawyer is not to be equated with their client, and is not to be subject to pressure to reject an unpopular brief.”
[Legal commentator Joshua] Rozenberg said, “It’s extraordinary that Dinah Rose, of all people, should be accused of supporting homophobia. She has argued a number of cases which have advanced LGBTQ+ rights, including a recent landmark case in Hong Kong in which she won equal rights to employment visas for same-sex couples.”
In 2012, Ms Rose was among a number of Jewish lawyers who criticised Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks and the London Beth Din for opposing the introduction of civil marriage for same-sex couples in the UK.
In 2021, it doesn’t matter what good you’ve done in the past. What matters are your sins, for which there is no forgiveness. And if this “sin” was in fact something you were legally required to do, well, that’s your problem.
Year Zero is not going to just happen on its own, you know.
JFC OMG SMDH
The sheer lack of basic logic seems staggering at times. In the first place, if a lawyer is specifically required to take on a case, it’s foolhardy to blame them for it. Second, her history clearly indicates her support for gay rights. Third, isn’t impartiality something we *want* in a lawyer?
Lastly, if this trend of faulting lawyers for taking certain clients were allowed to affect unpopular clients’ ability to find legal representation, one can only imagine how it might affect the court system if all those people had to represent themselves...?...
There’s a reason why the profession exists in the first place, and it has nothing to do with feelings and everything to do with enabling fact-based judgement, which is especially necessary in cases that engender strong feelings in the public. Someone has to make a rational decision, and legal representation is an essential part of that process.