Why does the American Right keep hiring bad lawyers?

[Razgovory]

Why do they keep hiring the shittiest lawyers they can?  This has been going on a for a while now, and I don't know what the deal is.  Remember Roy Moore's lawyer who threated to sue a media company if they did not retract stories and insert false statements?  I think he's in jail now.  But you also had Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen who ended up in prison and Trump's impeachment lawyers who claimed that a President can do anything they he wants.  Rudy is in a category all by himself.  Lin Wood appears to be insane and will likely be disbarred along with the Kraken woman.  Now this:

Go-to Lawyer for Capitol Riot Defendants Disappears
John Pierce has been a combative advocate for those accused of participating in the Jan. 6 attack, but he's missed court appearances for a week.

The mysterious disappearance of the lawyer John Pierce began last Tuesday, prosecutors say, when he missed a hearing for one of the many cases where he is representing a defendant in the Capitol riot investigation. The young associate who took his place said that Mr. Pierce had a "conflict." At the time, no one seemed to give it much mind.

But in the days that followed, Mr. Pierce — who is defending more cases connected to the riot than any other lawyer — missed additional hearings and the reasons for his absence started changing.

On Wednesday, his associate told a judge in one case that Mr. Pierce had gotten Covid-19 and was in the hospital on a ventilator — but only after telling a prosecutor in another case that Mr. Pierce had been in a car accident. That same evening, a different associate told a reporter that Mr. Pierce had in fact been hospitalized, but was getting care for "dehydration and exhaustion."

Finally, on Monday — after Mr. Pierce had still failed to emerge — the government got involved. Federal prosecutors issued letters to several judges in 17 Capitol riot cases, informing them that no one in the Justice Department had heard from Mr. Pierce in a week and that "multiple" phone numbers for his law firm appeared to have been disconnected.

His criminal cases had come to a "standstill," the prosecutors said, endangering the rights of his clients. If Mr. Pierce did not surface soon, they added, something — though it was not clear what — would have to be done.

The New York Times tried to reach Mr. Pierce several times by text and phone in recent days, but he did not respond.

Mr. Pierce's unexplained absence was only the latest twist in his outsized role in defending those accused of participating in the Capitol attack. His clients — among them members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia — have stood out not only for their number, but also for the scorched-earth battle that he has vowed to wage on their behalf.

A self-described pro-Trump populist, Mr. Pierce has promised, for example, to force the government to give him video footage of the Capitol for several days before and after Jan. 6, and has said he will demand information about every police officer working at the building that day. He has also vowed to subpoena hostile witnesses like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ostensibly to learn what she may have known about security at the Capitol before the attack.

Without citing evidence, Mr. Pierce has said he intends to implicate the F.B.I. and the intelligence community by showing that the riot was something like a grand act of entrapment or an inside job. He has often talked about his cases with a conspiratorial zeal, painting himself as something like a lonely legal warrior out to save his clients from an overreaching government.

"I'm like Gerard Butler in '300,'" Mr. Pierce said in an interview before dropping out of sight, comparing himself to the action star who played a Spartan king. "I'm in the hot gates at Thermopylae, holding the pass against the million-man Persian army."

While the government has not yet weighed in on the merits on his claims, prosecutors did express concern in their letters filed on Monday about the young associate, Ryan Joseph Marshall, who has been standing in for Mr. Pierce at the hearings he has missed.

For one thing, Mr. Marshall is not a licensed lawyer, prosecutors said, and has taken actions on behalf of clients "that he is not permitted" to take. Moreover, they went on, it remains unclear if and when Mr. Marshall will be able to get his law license given that he is under indictment in two criminal cases accusing him of corruption, theft and fraud in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Pierce's situation is not his first encounter with personal and professional setbacks. Last year, his law firm nearly collapsed in a swirl of debts and resignations. Then his most prominent client, Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man charged with murder at a racial justice protest in Wisconsin last year, fired him in a highly public spat that included allegations that a charity arranged for the defense had engaged in financial improprieties.

His work in the Capitol cases began just after the attack when he took several members of the far-right nationalist group the Proud Boys as clients. He has also been hired by L. Brent Bozell IV, the son of a prominent conservative commentator, as well as by a Florida pastor and a Minnesota pub worker.

In recent weeks, however, at least two clients have fired Mr. Pierce, complaining that he seemed unresponsive and appeared at times to be unversed in the details of their cases. Last week,  the wife of yet another client, Kenneth Harrelson, a member of the Oath Keepers from Florida, sent a letter to her friends and associates, complaining that her husband was having "issues" getting Mr. Pierce "to do his job."

Such complaints have come atop concerns that the sheer number of Mr. Pierce's clients has exposed him to accusations of conflict of interest. He is, for example, representing both James Cusick Jr., the Florida pastor, and Mr. Cusick's son Casey, who are charged with breaching the Capitol with another of his clients, David J. Lesperance, a member of the Cusicks' church.

In a separate case, Mr. Pierce has been hired by another father-and-son pair, Kevin and Nathaniel Tuck, two former Florida police officers who have been charged in an indictment with a Florida Proud Boy he also represents.

Almost eight months after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, two separate processes have been taking place in Washington. In one, the Justice Department has been filing charges resulting in nearly 600 criminal cases that have only begun to delve into the violence of Jan. 6. In another, conservatives have been waging a war of narratives, playing down the attack as the work of mere tourists or calling it a false-flag operation by the F.B.I.

Mr. Pierce has placed himself at the nexus of these efforts. While he has filed motions and — before his absence — appeared at hearings like any other lawyer, he has also maintained a steady presence on social media and right-wing media outlets, questioning the "Stasi-like tactics" of the F.B.I., teasing purported revelations about the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt inside the Capitol and attacking the investigation as political persecution.

Perhaps the best example of this is his plan to raise a so-called public authority defense for some of his clients, arguing that they cannot be held accountable for the Capitol attack because they were following official U.S. policy.

But Mr. Pierce will most likely not point to the role that former President Donald J. Trump had in whipping up supporters to storm the building. Instead, he has said that he believes that F.B.I. operatives and intelligence personnel, working undercover, incited the crowd to violence. And he has urged other defense lawyers to help him find proof.

All of that, of course, can only come to pass if he returns to court — and the government seems worried that might never happen.

"Unfortunately, it seems that Mr. Pierce may be hospitalized and unable to communicate," prosecutors wrote on Monday, "and it is unclear when Mr. Pierce will recover."

[crazy canuck]

You are not old enough to remember the lawyer who represented Ollie North.

[Sheilbh]

My impression from outside is that it's a combination of - they don't have a case so need someone who's willing to shred their standing and (especially Trump) they don't pay their bills.

[grumbler]

You are not old enough to remember the lawyer who represented Ollie North.

Brendan Sullivan was prominent in the news at least as late as 2008 (successful defense of Ted Stevens) and Raz certainly remembers the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, won by Sullivan as well.

[Josquius]

My impression from outside is that it's a combination of - they don't have a case so need someone who's willing to shred their standing and (especially Trump) they don't pay their bills.

Yeah, seems to me that it would attract people who think they can make a name for themselves as a high end ambulance chaser rather than anyone competent- the case is crap so you will lose, you just have to try and make the trial as messy as possible so you can claim it was fraudulent, then continue to sell your services to other idiots now that a serious career is gone.

[viper37]

Why do they keep hiring the shittiest lawyers they can?

G.W. Bush had good lawyers in 2000...


Maybe the good ones don't want to take frivolous cases and refer them to someone, more, hmm, bonkers?

[The Minsky Moment]

It's not right and left. Good lawyers tend not to like to represent scumbag deadbeats; it's just that since 2015 such people have become highly concentrated in the activist American political Right.

[The Minsky Moment]

There's a deeper issue here - all lawyers, regardless of political persuasion - have a professional and economic interest in maintaining the rule of law.  A party or political tendency that falls into extra-constitutionality and insurrectionism is not attractive.