Marc Murphy from Murphy’s Law: “…an attorney can never help their client commit a crime. Most of an attorney’s work is after-the-fact, and, even then, a lawyer cannot promote perjury or use their clients’ lies in trial if they know them to be false. And, while a lawyer “may discuss the legal consequences of a proposed course of conduct” with a client, they may not, ever, “counsel a client to engage, or assist a client, in conduct that the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent”. This, however, is exactly what a growing number of lawyers are doing right now on behalf of Donald Trump. They may be our biggest problem. And they should be ashamed. I take this personally, as a lawyer and law professor. Lawyers, despite the glossy image preferred by streaming service show runners, are not hired guns. They have obligations to more than their own clients. In fact, the first obligation lawyers undertake, in the presence of their family, future colleagues, and a Justice or two of their state Supreme Court, is to support the Constitutions of the United States and their own state. The same U.S. Constitution the new lawyers had recently agonized over in law school. The Constitution that is subject to constant scrutiny and interpretation but has at its core meant certain things beyond responsible debate: That the U.S. has no king. That all persons are guaranteed Due Process. And that the right to counsel does not include a right to force your lawyers to help you commit your crimes.

The managing lawyers of mega firms Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps and this Administration’s appointees doing its antidemocratic bidding within the Department of Justice were apparently tragically absent the day this was taught in law school. Bad day to miss. Since the beginning of Trump’s rise to power libraries full of thought pieces have been written about various demographic or geographic or other groups’ support for Trump. It’s been blamed on economic anxiety, our public education system, religion, the inept Democratic Party, and other things. There’s truth in some form in all of that and decades from now in the event history is still being written at all it will be fully explored. Some people who supported Donald Trump, it will be concluded, had excuses. Lawyers have none. The thickest, least cognitively agile, worst-class-attending, non-outlining graduate of any law school in the nation knows that the Trump Presidency is in the middle of the most illegal, unconstitutional, cruel, and unnecessary blitzkrieg against the Rule of Law the nation has ever encountered. This is an obvious and uncontroversial point. What isn’t obvious and should be very controversial is that he’s doing it with the assistance of (a) lawyers at the Department of Justice and in other Cabinet agencies and (b) lawyers at an increasing number of the nation’s largest and most successful law firms. All of them should know better. All of them do know better. All of them should be disbarred…”