Desperate to stay relevant, The Lincoln Project has adopted yet another liberal strategy: harassing people who disagree with them. Following the example of Rep. Maxine Waters' calls to harass Republicans going about their everyday lives, The Lincoln Project has called for harassment of individual lawyers and large law firms representing President Trump in election litigation.
The Lincoln Project started by targeting Jones Day and Porter Wright, which are representing President Trump in Pennsylvania. RNLA's Vice President for Election Education Ron Hicks and his colleagues at Porter Wright are leaders of the Trump Pennsylvania legal team (along with former RNLA Southeastern Pennsylvania Chapter Chair Linda Kerns), and the firm has received threats for its representation.
The Lincoln Project's tweet attacking Mr. Hicks and Carolyn McGee individually is screen-shotted here, but surprisingly, Twitter actually removed it for violating its policies against harassment (perhaps they saw that The Lincoln Project claims to be Republican and didn't realize they were Never Trumpers). A tweet attacking the firms is still up and another tweet encouraging people to harass individual employees of the firms is also still up. Yes, The Lincoln Project is advocating individual, personal harassment against 20-something legal secretaries at Jones Day who have no power over who the firm's clients are.
Setting aside the absurdity of targeting a large law firm for one of its clients represented by a small legal team amongst its over 2,500 attorneys in 43 offices, Jones Day released a statement distancing itself from the post-election litigation alleging voter fraud, with which it is not involved, demanding that the media retract its false reporting, and asserting that it will not withdraw from the representation.
At base, this is an attempt to interfere with the President's right to counsel, as Nick Arama points out at Redstate:
I guess Democrats are allowed to undermine the duly-elected president and question his legitimacy for four years. But Trump isn’t allowed to question improprieties alleged in sworn affidavits for a few days, according to these clowns. Apparently “count every vote” only applies when it’s Democrats who may gain from the process, not Republicans. The hypocrisy is stunning.
How dare they claim the name of Lincoln when they dare to try to interfere with the president’s right to legal counsel? Nothing would be more shameful in the eyes of the Lincoln the lawyer.
Even some who have rather vocally opposed President Trump, such as law professors Orin Kerr and Eric Segall, have condemned this move:
It's a bad idea for two reasons, I think.
— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) November 10, 2020
1) Going after lawyers for representing unpopular clients in unpopular legal claims has a really bad history, and tends to not go well. Our legal system needs lawyers to take on unpopular clients. Focus on the clients, not the lawyers.
That doesn't mean that lawyers can never be subject to criticism, of course. But this sounds like an effort to get a law firm to drop a client, or to deter others from taking up that client, in order to make things more difficult for the client. That's a really dangerous path.
— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) November 10, 2020
This is a terrible idea, you're right.
— Eric Segall (@espinsegall) November 10, 2020
Prof. Kerr correctly points out that the point is to pressure a law firm to drop a client (potentially raising ethical issue, given their representation in ongoing litigation) and ensure that no other firms are willing to represent the client, who happens to still be the President of the United States, even if some people have started ignoring that.
This fits into the latest anti-Trump strategy - to attack everyone who supports his presidency. Lest anyone forget, the left has already been compiling Stalin-style "enemies lists" of people who support President Trump. At least no death camps have been proposed yet - just reeducation, inability to get a job, and societal rejection, extending even to those 71 million Americans who voted for President Trump. As Chad Felix Greene wrote at The Federalist:
While Trump supporters don’t have our very own designated patch to wear on our clothes and the trains are still empty, the same powerful motivator at work is these leftists’ self-righteousness and unshakeable belief in their moral justification. They are doing the exact thing they accused Trump and his administration of doing for the last four years. . . .
What matters here is the language, the tactics, and the moral justification those on the left are using. It is the way they dehumanize their opposition and shake away any hint of humanity with declarations of the evils we have committed and why we deserve to be punished, shamed, and exiled merely for daring to disagree with their politics.
What is most ironic is the claim those who worked for the Trump administration and who supported him in 2016 and 2020 are somehow frantically trying to erase it all to save ourselves. The left is fomenting an environment where political affiliation is dangerous to the personal life of anyone who challenges them.
The right to representation is a fundamental part of our adversarial legal system that protects the rule of law even if it does not always reach the outcomes people would prefer. The reprehensible attacks on lawyers who would have the temerity to represent the President of the United States are only part of a widespread effort to drive those who support President Trump (apparently all 71 million of us) from all aspects of public life. Even more than they have the last four years, liberals are going to try to make it impossible for anyone to deviate from the liberal orthodoxy. Under a Biden Administration, they would not only have the support of the mainstream media and academia but also the Executive Branch.
The RNLA applauds Ron Hicks and his colleagues and Linda Kerns for their zealous representation of their client and service to the American people, even in the face of attacks from the left against their livelihoods and even their ability to practice law.