Legal profession bears scars of presidential scandals

As the gaggle of defendants — many of them lawyers — complete the initial criminal booking process in the presidential election subversion case in neighboring Georgia and the legal woes continue to mount for former President Trump there and here in Florida, New York and Washington, D.C., one of the most disappointing, disturbing,   and depressing themes is the centrality of attorneys in the morass.

Five of the half-dozen unindicted co-conspirators in the federal case in the nation’s capital are attorneys, and the unidentified sixth may be one, too. In the Georgia case, attorneys are at core of the group  of 18 alleged co-conspirators with the ex-president.

The integral role that lawyers allegedly have played in the wrongdoing emanating from the Trump White House harkens back to the other seismic presidential  scandal  in living memory, President Richard  Nixon’s Watergate affair, which concluded with Nixon’s resignation and ensuing pardon by incoming President General Ford. While circumstances underlying the Trump and Nixon scandals differ, they share the common feature of attempts to subvert democratic norms and elections orchestrated largely by lawyers. While Trump, unlike Nixon, is not a lawyer, he has spent more time  in litigation and courtrooms lately than many attorneys. But both of them were the architects of the attacks on democracy, carried out principally by attorneys acting at their direction or on their behalves.In Watergate, it was the repentant White House counsel John Dean, who turned his contrition into a lucrative post-Watergate author and television commentator career; the defiant Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman, the initiator of several liberal domestic policies; break-in mastermind Gordon Liddy, who emerged from prison as the progenitor  of right-wing talk radio; ebullient Donald  Segretti, the dirty trickster; the Sphinx-like Attorney General John Mitchell, who headed Nixon’s re-election organization, the aptly named Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP); Clark MacGregor, a former Minnesota congressman, one of many from that state involved in Watergate, who took over Mitchell’s role after he resigned following the Watergate  break-in; and Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was involved in his own bribery side-hustle, among others lawyers. A Floridian, Senator Edward Gurney, an attorney, also was in the mix, although not criminally implicated, but a shill for Nixon during the Senate Watergate hearings leading up to the impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives preceding his resignation. Gurney later faced his own criminal problems, being accused while in office of influence peddling, but acquitted of those charges. For Trump, many of  the spear carriers of the claimed conspiracy have been lawyers like Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor” turned “America’s Maniac;” John Eastman, the architect of the “fake electors” scheme; and several others whose behavior seems more clownish than crafty counselors, armed with lots of election fraud theories but never produced an iota of evidence; not to forget Michael Cohen, Trump’s consigliere, who was at the heart of the prior alleged pre-2016 election Stormy Daniels “hush money” subterfuge; and some of the lawyers who have been implicated, intentionally  or as dupes, in the  concealment connivances in Florida of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.In short, the fingerprints of lawyers are all over the  accusations of criminality against the former president. While the ex-president is constitutionally entitled to the presumption of innocence in courtrooms, a presumption of ethical and moral propriety does not attach to the machinations of his various lawyers.After Watergate, the legal craft was rightfully held in disrepute for the illegitimate  behavior of those Nixonian attorneys. Taken to task for the aberrant actions, the profession implemented a number of new ethical protocols to avert similar misconduct in the future. Law schools, which all of the alleged Trump co-conspirators attended after Watergate, instituted rigorous training and periodic examinations on ethical issues to assure that wrongdoing like that experienced in Watergate would never happen again.

The law schools here in Florida were among those providing upgraded ethical training for aspiring attorneys. But the Trump co-conspirators must have skipped those   classes at whatever law schools they attended or had surrogates take the tests for them, like the imposter who reportedly took one of Trump’s SAT entrance exams to get into the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Now, to borrow from that legal sage Yogi Berra, “it’s deja vu all over again.” The lawyers at the core of the Trump cabal seemed to have learned nothing at all from Watergate and those law school lessons it spurred, except to try to do it better, and don’t be detected putting masking tape on a break-in door. But it seems that they aren’t passing that exam. So, the legal profession will emerge from this latest White House crisis with more scars accompanied by heart-felt pledges to avoid doing it again. But it’s doubtful that its members with dysfunctional ethical compasses will do any better next time an opportunity develops to exercise levers of power or to maintain them, either.It was a century ago, the summer of 1923, that another epic  White House scandal, known as Teapot Dome, broke out, following the death 100 years ago this month of President Warren G. Harding, no finely tuned  ethical maven himself.   At the center of that contretemps: Attorney General Harry Daugherty, the nation’s top lawyer.The message that emerges from these lawyer-fueled scandals emanating from the White House is reminiscent of the passage from Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” As the folk singer pondered: “When will they ever learn?”Marshall H. Tanick of Naples is a constitutional law attorney.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Legal profession bears scars of presidential scandals