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Defending Democracy & the Rule of Law

A bipartisan effort to deter future abuse of the legal system by lawyers seeking to overturn legitimate elections. We will hold such lawyers accountable for past abuses and will work to revitalize the state bar disciplinary process so that lawyers, including public officials, who lie about election results and who fuel insurrection will face professional consequences.

Our Mission

Following Biden’s victory, an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on bogus assertions to overturn the election and give Trump a second term. While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted “coup-via-courtroom,” Trump and his “Big Lie Lawyers” have “learned lessons” from 2020 and are already working to seize control of state and local election processes and to prepare for malicious election litigation efforts. 

The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections.

Protecting Future Elections

As the January 6th Committee’s work has confirmed, lawyers played a central role in then-President Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. Many of those lawyers, and their conduct, are subject to ethics rules. But just as Trump and his allies sought to exploit vagueness in the Electoral Count Act, so too have some lawyers evaded accountability because of gaps in the legal profession’s ethical rules. And just as Congress is rushing to fix those statutory holes, state supreme courts also must address certain weaknesses in the rules of professional conduct.

We are working closely with law professors and professional responsibility practitioners to develop model rules, and we will push state bar associations to adopt them.