Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) filed complaints in five states on Friday demanding that Rudy Giuliani and 22 other lawyers working with the Trump campaign be disbarred for filing “frivolous” lawsuits and allegedly engaging in “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in their failed attempts to overturn the election results.
Giuliani has happily waged Trump’s election delegitimization war for him, launching unsuccessful legal challenges in several swing states as part of an effort to cast doubt on President-elect Joe Biden’s legitimate victory. Trump’s personal lawyer has held bizarre press conferences where his conspiracy-laden meltdowns have spurred blistering rebukes from federal judges.
Pascrell isn’t taking Giuliani’s flailing attempts at overturning election results lightly.
Pascrell told the Washington Post on Tuesday that his rationale for filing the complaints against Giuliani and other Trump campaign lawyers has much to do with how President Trump “has done great damage to this nation — but he has always had helpers.”
“These lawyers are enabling his treachery and harming our democracy,” Pascrell told the Post through a spokesperson on Monday, before argue that the campaign legal team committed “misconduct and an affront to the rule of law” in their unsuccessful attempts to overturn election results.
The Post reported that Pascrell filed grievances with regulatory and disciplinary boards within the state bar associations in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Giuliani’s home state of New York.
Pascrell argued that there is no time better than now for Giuliani — who reportedly requested that the Trump campaign pay him $20,000 a day for his legal work, which Trump’s personal lawyer denied — to be held accountable.
“Failure to hold Giuliani and his crew accountable by revoking their licenses will only invite further abuses by bad actors and push America closer to lawlessness and authoritarianism,” Pascrell told the Post.
The Post noted that disbarring a lawyer happens infrequently, citing the American Bar Association’s Survey on Lawyer Discipline in 2018, which estimated that among the roughly 1.3 million active and licensed lawyers in the country, only 378 were involuntarily disbarred that year.
However, there are substantial consequences when a lawyer is disbarred. In Nevada, which is one of the five where Pascrell filed complaints against Giuliani, disbarment means that a lawyer is banned from practicing law in the state.
