Self Regulation is to Regulation as Self Importance is to Importance

Case in point, the Virginia Bar, which has refused to investigate a complaint against not-interim-US-Attorney for flagrant violations of legal codes of professional conduct.

When you have lawyers policing lawyers, you have no policing nor any legal professional standards.

In case anyone was wondering whether state bars would step up to hold anyone accountable if the Trump administration sends cronies to cosplay as U.S. Attorneys and fire career prosecutors so they can file bad faith criminal cases, the Virginia State Bar has helpfully answered: LOL, no.

Last month, the Campaign for Accountability filed ethics complaints in both Virginia and Florida against Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer serving as the Interim-But-Not-Legally-Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging she’d violated multiple rules supposedly governing members of the bar. In response, Virginia sent a polite letter explaining that it would pass on looking into allegations of a pattern of misconduct and would rather leave it to the courts. “Whether criminal indictments were obtained through material misrepresentations of fact and done for political purposes falls within the authority of the court to determine and not this office.”

………

In fairness to the Virginia State Bar, the most egregious allegations — the ones involving Halligan’s illegal actions as a squatter pretending to be a U.S. Attorney and her shady effort to ramrod through a falsified indictment in a desperate bid to beat the statute of limitations — may well have been properly within the court’s purview. While every adult with a frontal lobe already suspected that the judge would find that Halligan’s misadventures compromised the cases, there’s nothing wrong with the state bar exercising prudence and steering clear of those allegations until the court acted. For the record, the federal judge presiding over these matters has since confirmed that Halligan possessed no more authority than “any private citizen off the street — attorney or not” and kicked the indictments as void.

The problem with the “we have to defer to the courts” excuse from the Virginia Bar is that the ethics complaint raises more issues beyond the status of the indictments. Issues that explicitly fall outside the authority of the court to determine. By shrugging off the whole complaint over the limited issue of the indictments, the Virginia Bar created a troubling zone of unaccountability.

The purpose of a state bar, much like it is for other private professional groups with authority to supervise their members is 2 fold:

1. Protect their members from accountability.
2. Ensure that these professional organizations retain their power and prestige.