Just a brief comment, which we’ll preface by saying that we have no dog in what is nevertheless unquestionably a fight to the death between the Trumpster and the swamp.
There’s been a lot of commentary on the Manafort trial and its significance. But we think Professor Turley’s musings are interesting on a number of levels, and most because he’s wading into the province of the trial lawyer, criticizing the “hung jury strategy”.
We made our comments on that here and have nothing to add.
Meanwhile the Washington Post, consummate mouthpiece of received swamp beltway opinion, worries about Trump’s attacks on the “justice system”. Yet the biggest and most obvious threat to the foundations of our justice system came not from the Trumpster, but from his lawyer Michael Cohen, and this has gone unremarked not only from the expected house organs like the Washington Post and the New York Times, but somewhat surprisingly from the blawgosphere which we usually rely upon to bring attention to such issues.
Specifically, how far can prosecutors go in pressuring a lawyer to betray his client? Assuming the client is a horrible criminal, is it not a threat to the very structure of the system for prosecutors to bring charges against a lawyer so that they can get to the lawyer’s client?
Yet so far as we are aware, only the luminary Harvey Silverglate (Three Felonies a Day)(Princeton and Harvard, doncha know) has even mentioned what to us is an obvious question to ask, and this was back in April before the issue more formally came up this week:
Silverglate said not only Cohen but prosecutors could be disbarred for overstepping the well-established ethical boundaries.
Put another way, why isn’t the criminal defense bar rising up in one voice to deplore what is happening with Michael Cohen, not for his sake but for the system’s? Should there not be some scrutiny of this prosecutorial decision, and the prosecutors involved, somewhere?
We’re on pins and needles over here waiting for that shoe to drop, but not holding our breath. Ugh.
Lawyers on Strike 
Prof. Turley has no discernable partisan allegiances and his ideology is fuzzy. There are two or three features of note about his commentary. (1) He is very resistant to acknowledging anything that would bring the legal system into disrepute. Actual misbehavior doesn’t appear to bother him. The kid pointing out that the judge-emperor and prosecutor-emperor are prancing around with no clothes on bothers him. (2) He’s a law professor whose legal work has (AFAIK) been limited to occasional appellate practice. Yet, he’s forever telling trial lawyers and elected politicians how to do their jobs. That’s something different than being dismayed with things done by these actors and something different than a qualified suggestion that they do things differently. (3) As has been pointed out by a rank-and-file trial lawyer who comments there, he’s personally acquainted with Michael Avanetti, and assiduously avoids remarking on his portfolio of domestic and business scandals even as he rakes Michael Cohen over the coals.
The Cohen case is troubling because it seems like a fishing expedition. No clue how Robert Mueller’s crew ‘stumbled’ over something which then gave the U.S. Attorney’s office through (the conduit of a judge-accomplice) a license to undertake a dumpster-dive through his tax returns and through the financial statements attending his various businesses. Has it been established that the bank he supposedly snookered ever offered a complaint about him? And isn’t it interesting that in a country were 17% of the income tax liability goes uncollected for various reasons and in a country where of all the tax deadbeats in America the Tax Division of the Justice Department appears to criminally prosecute just a few hundred people a year, two people associated with Trump are facing criminal prosecution rather than the usual demands for repayment with interest and penalties and fines?
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Well, it’s also a very troubling incursion on the attorney client relationship, don’t you think? And yes, the motives of prosecutors can be questioned, not that it happens much, but that should change. Here, why Manafort? Why now? Why Cohen? Why now? Would any of this be happening if the election had gone the other way? If not – that is, if these are primarily political prosecutions – should they be permitted? Why are they any better than a “vindictive” prosecution, ruled out of bounds in Blackledge?
Throw in that the Cohen thing is deeply troubling in and of itself.
They’ve lost perspective down there in the swamp.
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