RUTHFULLY YOURS

Left-wing character assassin and inveterate liar David Brock has created yet another cancel-culture group, this time aimed at punishing lawyers who dared to defend the Trump campaign in post-election litigation or challenged the 2020 presidential election results.

In other words, the Left is now in the business of crushing lawyers for trying to do their job as lawyers. The fact that these attorneys lost in court, and in some cases were sanctioned by judges, isn’t enough for Brock – he and his comrades want their blood because they tried to help Donald Trump.

The stated goal of The 65 Project, a so-called dark money group, is to spend millions of dollars to disbar 111 pro-Trump lawyers in 26 states, ruin their lives, and make them homeless for participating in election lawsuits that courts rejected. The group has already initiated bar complaints and reportedly intends to lobby the American Bar Association and state bar associations for new rules forbidding certain kinds of  election challenges and to adopt model language stipulating that “fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results violate the ethical duties lawyers must abide by.”

The new group aspires to frighten conservative legal talent away from any future Republican efforts to challenge elections, such as this year’s midterms, and 2024. Democrat consultant Melissa Moss, a veteran of the Clinton administration reportedly came up with the idea. Moss has been described as a former senior political appointee at the U.S. Department of Commerce and as former finance director of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Among The 65 Project’s advisory board members are former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and alleged conservative Republican Paul Rosenzweig, who was formerly senior counsel for the Clinton-era Whitewater investigation and who held a position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.

Rosenzweig’s presence on this toothless board of bloviation helps support The 65 Project’s claim to be bipartisan.

But Rosenzweig isn’t much of a conservative and he’s a confirmed Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) sufferer.

“With great power comes great responsibility. Lawyers have a special role in and special obligation to society,” Rosenzweig told Axios, which broke the story of The 65 Project’s formation on March 7, 2022.

“It is all the worse, then, when they use their special position to attack the foundations of the rule of law,” he said, toeing the leftist line on Trump-related post-election litigation.

Rosenzweig is comfortable repeating proven lies about former President Donald Trump.

In a discussion of senile then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Rosenzweig recounted that Mueller said Trump had been involved in an “apparent welcoming of Russian interference in our election.”

Instead of challenging the “welcoming” assertion, which presumably a sharp, honorable attorney would do, he accepted the smear as gospel, even though it is a lie created by TV talking head Katy Tur. Later in the NPR interview aired July 24, 2019, Rosenzweig said the testimony reinforced his beliefs about Trump. “Those who were convinced that he has committed crimes for which he could be charged outside of the context here, like me, came away reaffirmed in that belief,” he said.

During Trump’s first impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, Rosenzweig performed for the TV cameras, telling ABC News in a segment aired January 20, 2020, that Trump’s defense heading into the trial was akin to the “scream of a wounded animal” and “a raging against the tide.”

In the headline on a May 5, 2021 column at the lefty rag, The Atlantic, Rosenzweig summed up his fascistic feelings about Trump’s presence on Facebook: “Ban Him Forever: To send the right message, Donald Trump’s removal from Facebook must be permanent.”

In another Atlantic column, this time from May 8, 2020, Rosenzweig argued the Mueller investigation of Trump’s alleged connections to Russia was not a “hoax,” and that the Trump Justice Department’s move to drop the baseless, politically motivated case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn was, as the author stated in his headline, “An attack on a fundamental principle of justice.” Ignoring the exhaustively documented shortcomings of the Mueller probe, Rosenzweig wrote that then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s “action is a manifest politicization of the prosecutorial process, all in order to benefit the president.”

If another Atlantic contributor, the holier-than-thou Obamacare fan and would-be gun grabber, David Frum, who viciously mocked Andrew Breitbart on the day of his death, is a conservative, well, then Rosenzweig must be one as well.

This loathsome group of ambulance chasers that Rosenzweig advises reportedly plans to spend around $2.5 million in its first year.

The “65,” by the way, is a reference to the number of lawsuits the group claims were filed that sought to invalidate the 2020 election results.

“Following Biden’s victory an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on lies to overturn the election and give Trump a second term,” the group’s website lectures.

“While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted ‘coup-via-courtroom,’ Trump has worked to further seize control of state and local election processes and ramp up malicious election litigation efforts — which only embolden future fraudulent legal actions aimed at overturning legitimate elections. Simultaneously, the lies and disinformation included in these lawsuits continue to give oxygen to the Big Lie, which festers in right-wing political and media circles and social media discussions and is a long-term threat to American democracy.”

This kind of blatherskite is what Brock has become known for.

Once upon a time, Brock was a conservative journalist who rose to prominence by targeting the Clintons. Eventually he realized there was much more money in doing the Clintons’ bidding. The famously paranoid publicity hound hallucinated widespread anti-gay animus in Republican circles, changed sides, and became a Machiavellian political operative, prolific fundraiser, and propagandist for the Democrats. He also founded Media Matters for America, a George Soros-funded, fake fact-checking outfit, and two super PACs – Priorities USA Action and American Bridge 21st Century. Media Matters for America, which purports to fight “conservative misinformation,” has trumpeted the absurd Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory and promoted Hillary Clinton for years.

The 65 Project’s malicious mission is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them [i.e. the lawyers] and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms,” Brock told Axios.

“I think the littler fish are probably more vulnerable to what we’re doing,” Brock said. “You’re threatening their livelihood. And, you know, they’ve got reputations in their local communities.”

The 65 Project is going after three categories of lawyers, Axios reported after reviewing the group’s plans.

The first is, “Trump’s legal inner circle, including lawyers such as campaign hands Jenna Ellis and Boris Epshteyn and post-election lawyers like Sidney Powell and Joe DiGenova.”

The second is, “Lawyers who signed on as ‘alternate electors,’ who planned to submit their names to the Electoral College in lieu of legitimate elector slates if Trump-aligned legal challenges succeeded.”

And the third is, “Licensed attorneys who participated in or were present at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

The 65 Project website brags about the bar complaints it has lodged so far against attorneys who have committed the grievous sin of supporting former President Donald Trump inside, and in some cases, outside, of court.

The lawyers marked for career death to date are: Paul M. Davis (pdf); Cleta Mitchell (pdf); Jenna Ellis (pdf); Joseph diGenova (pdf); Boris Epshteyn (pdf); William McCall Calhoun (pdf); William Bradley Carver (pdf); Daryl Moody (pdf); and James Troupis and Andrew Hitt (pdf). Carver, Moody, and Hitt are alleged to have falsely claimed to be presidential electors. Troupis is alleged to have coordinated false elector slates.

Davis, of Texas, told Axios The 65 Project “is nothing more than a desperate attempt by leftist hacks and mercenaries.” Its goal is “to neutralize anyone on the right with the ability to stand in the way of the Left’s efforts to hide malfeasance in the 2020 elections and to clear the path nor a repeat of similar malfeasance in the 2022 mid-terms.”

High-profile lawyer Sidney Powell told this writer The 65 Project is “unconstitutional, un-American, abusive, and hateful.”

Speaking of Brock, she said by email, “I can’t even imagine how soulless and sick he and his comrades have to be to dedicate themselves and millions of dollars to try to destroy the lives and livelihoods of others. Those dollars could be spent instead to build Habitat [for Humanity] homes or shelters for the homeless. Brock and his ilk don’t solve problems; they create them. Pathetic.”

Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, said Brock is “doing this just to destroy the lives of the attorneys who defended Trump,” but “everyone, even people that David Brock hates, deserve vigorous legal representation.”

The 65 Project is an example of “a particularly vicious streak of cancel culture,” Levey said.

The Committee for Justice describes itself as “devoted to restoring the Founders’ vision of a federal judiciary governed by the rule of law and anchored by the Constitution.”

Former Department of Justice civil rights attorney J. Christian Adams said lawyers should steer clear of “flimsy legal theories and only bring cases with merit.”

That said, the fact that The 65 Project has been created “shows the Left is swimming in so much cash that they can implement any thuggish program they choose to,” said Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

PILF calls itself “the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity,” and says it “exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections.”

In the end, The 65 Project won’t accomplish anything noble or public-spirited – it seems much more likely to undermine America’s legal and political systems by intimidating lawyers and discouraging candidates from seeking justice in the courts.

Which is exactly the point.