Group that tried to disbar Ted Cruz over 2020 wants ban on election lies by lawyers

WASHINGTON – A legal watchdog group that sought to disbar Sen. Ted Cruz and others who tried to help Donald Trump overturn his defeat called Wednesday for rules to forbid lawyers – including those in elected office – from lying about elections.

“As the January 6 committee’s work has confirmed, lawyers played a central role in then President Trump’s attempts to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election,” said Michael Teter, managing director of the 65 Project, launched last spring to deter abuse of the legal system to overturn fair elections.

The group has sought disciplinary action against 55 lawyers, including a number of state attorneys general and members of Trump’s inner circle.

In May, the 65 Project filed a complaint against Cruz with the Texas bar, seeking to strip his law license for aiding an “anti-democratic” plot to keep Trump in power despite his defeat. At the time, a Cruz aide dismissed the group as “a far-left dark money smear machine run by a who’s who of shameless Democrat hacks.”

Letters dated June 13 to Cruz and the 65 Project, provided Thursday by Cruz’s office, show the Texas bar dismissed the complaint on grounds that it lacked jurisdiction. The bar’s Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel wrote that the allegations showed no professional misconduct within the scope of professional rules that apply to Texas attorneys “in the discharge of any responsibilities owed to a client, a court, or the legal profession.”

The group describes itself as bipartisan. It says that none of its complaints nationwide have been dismissed, and at least a dozen are being pursued.

John Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard Nixon who served prison time for his role in the Watergate scandal, recently joined the effort as a senior advisor.

The House committee investigating the attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, holds what is likely its last hearing on Thursday.

Well over half the Republicans in the U.S. House voted not to certify all of Biden’s electoral votes that day, including most of the Texans.

Cruz opened himself to possible attack under rules of conduct for lawyers by offering to represent Trump before the U.S. Supreme Court.

By contrast, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who worked with Cruz to round up Senate support for overturning the election, was not acting as a lawyer, even though he invoked his legal credentials to bolster the legitimacy of the effort.

The 65 Project views that as a gaping loophole.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Teter said. “He needs to speak honestly about American democracy.”

Lawyers have a special responsibility to uphold the rule of law, said Paul Rosenzweig, a member of the group’s advisory board and a senior homeland security official in the George W. Bush administration who called himself a “genuine conservative.”

“We cannot ever forget that a lawyer may, as Sidney Powell did, submit false and fictitious information to a court and then justify her filing on the grounds that no one would actually believe that she was trying to tell the truth that it was just a political exercise. That is not what the courts and the legal system are about,” he said.

Powell, a former Justice Department official from Dallas, faces misconduct allegations filed March 1 by the Texas bar, which says she pushed frivolous claims and knowingly lied in court to overturn the election.

A non-jury trial is set for April 24.

Rozensweig downplayed concerns about hamstringing politicians’ free speech.

Courts insist on factual accuracy, he noted, and judges impose gag orders to suppress public comments, truthful or otherwise.

When it comes to the “peaceful transition of power according to the people’s will… I don’t have much problem with the idea of carving out specific restrictions,” he said, adding that politicians would still be able to promote “the general lie…that your taxes will go up, or your Medicare payments will go down, or that gas prices aren’t Biden’s fault.”

Renee Knake Jefferson, a legal ethics expert at the University of Houston Law Center who also advises the 65 Project, said ethics rules should apply even when a lawyer isn’t representing a party in a dispute.

“Lawyer lies designed to sabotage valid election results should not be considered protected political speech,” she said, summarizing views she published in the Yale Law Review.

“I am not here to suggest in any way a wholesale ban on lies,” she said. But if an officeholder or candidate is so troubled about not being able to speak dishonestly, they can always give up their law license.

“They don’t have to continue being a lawyer,” she said.