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(Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)
Congratulations to Senator Ted Cruz, the latest Trumpland lawyer to net himself a bar complaint for his efforts to overturn the presidential election. Cruz now joins a distinguished fraternity which includes Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Ken Paxton, Jeffrey Clark, and, of course, John Eastman. What an honor!
As flagged by Law & Crime, a group called The 65 Project filed a complaint with the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel for the Texas State Bar. The consortium of attorneys, whose name is an allusion to the 65 garbage lawsuits filed by various Krakens and crackpots in an attempt to reverse Joe Biden’s win in 2020, requests that the bar sanction the Texas senator for violating “numerous” Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct by “assisting with criminal conduct and defending and amplifying ‘claims not backed by law’ and ‘claims not backed by evidence (but instead, speculation, conjecture, and unwarranted suspicion).’”
The complaint rests largely on Cruz’s involvement in Texas AG Ken Paxton’s offensively stupid LOLsuit seeking to get the Supreme Court to toss out the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin for bad vote thingy, more or less. The justices yeeted it into the sun post haste, but before that happened, Cruz enthusiastically endorsed Paxton’s laughable claims.
In fact, he did more than endorse them. Even the Texas Solicitor General refused to put his name on that piece of drek, but Cruz told Sean Hannity on December 7, 2020 that Trump had asked him and he’d agreed to argue the case before the Supreme Court. He also claimed to be attached to another doomed case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans seeking to have all absentee ballots in the state tossed out.
“Mr. Cruz’s conduct before and after his involvement in those matters also raises concerns. He regularly sought to intentionally amplify these false claims on multiple occasions and in various forums,” the group alleges, before pointing to multiple debunked claims about absentee ballot procedures in Pennsylvania which Cruz flogged.
According to the complaint, as an attorney associated with the lawsuits, Cruz failed to adhere to Texas’s Disciplinary Code, which cautions that, “A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless the lawyer reasonably believes that there is a basis for doing so that is not frivolous.” Similarly, it asserts that he violated the rule that “a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of material fact or law to a third person.”
Finally, the The 65 Project lawyers allege that Cruz’s involvement in the plot to reject electors based on John Eastman’s Coups 4 Dummies memo amounts to “assist[ing] or counsel[ing] a client to engage in conduct that the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent.” And they’ve got US District Judge David O. Carter’s finding that the crime-fraud exception applies to some of John Eastman’s emails to back them up when they say that the scheme to toss out the electors was criminal in nature.
Moreover, in his testimony to the January 6 Select Committee, Eastman took the Fifth about his communications with Cruz, suggesting that whatever they were doing might subject him to criminal liability. And, bolstering the claim that Cruz was an attorney involved in this harebrained plot, Eastman has designated his emails with Cruz as privileged.
In March, the Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline petitioned that the state’s court sanction Sidney Powell for her egregious conduct after the election. But Powell was actually sanctioned by a federal court for misconduct, and is the defendant in multiple suits for defamatory statements she made in the election lawsuits. It’s not clear whether this complaint against Cruz, whose conduct seems of a different nature than Powell’s has legs.
But even as a form of “copium,” the disapprobation from the former president of the Texas State Bar and the former chair of its Grievance Committee, among other signatories, is not a great look.
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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