This is one of the things I was talking about. A U.S. District Court judge ordered the release of the audio of a voicemail left by John Dowd, Trump's criminal atty. (When I say criminal atty., it reminds me of what Jessie Pinkman told Walter White about Saul Goodman in "Breaking Bad". "I don't mean you need a criminal atty that way. I mean you need a CRIMINAL atty.). At any rate, the audio is now widely available for all to listen to as of today, in all its shamelessness.
On the audio, Dowd ID's himself and in his own voice, calls Michael Flynn's atty. and engages in some unmistakable witness intimidation and dangles a pardon (i.e., bribery). So again I ask, why is he not disbarred?
Remember the old chestnut about how evil triumphs when good people do nothing? I thank everyone who took the time to post on this thread, and I'm not casting aspersions on anyone. But I have to say that reading the replies has been instructive in a way. Almost all the replies amounted to things like "everybody does it" (aren't lawyers rightly supposed to be held to a higher standard?). Or, "it's just a few rotten apples" (while that may be true, we are talking about the rotten apples at the very top of the profession, and shouldn't their conduct be exemplary?). And while I admire the good and generous lawyers who rushed to the aid of immigrants at the border, I don't recall the mention of any of the WH lawyers being among them. Oh wait, they couldn't help out with that b/c it would have been a conflict of interest in light of the fact that some of them were involved in formulating and defending the very policies that the good and generous lawyers were fighting.
I found it somewhat striking that the one poster who seemed to agree with the idea that these attys. should be disbarred appears to be a Canadian. Have we really become so inured to corruption in this country? I feel like a crazy person ranting about this, but is this really what we deserve? I seem to remember the philosopher Hannah Arendt saying something about evil seeping in so slowly that we don't notice.
I listened to the audio. I think you have a grave misunderstanding of what it is like to be a lawyer. You are ethically obligated to act in your client's best interests. But the hard part is that you are there to give advice, but the CLIENT makes the decisions. If you explain everything to the client and then he tells you, "I don't care, do [X Y Z] anyway," and if this is not expressly illegal or unethical or posing harm to someone else, then you are to carry out those orders. This puts you in a constant gray area where you are exercising your judgment, and it is this judgment that clients are paying you for.
Applied here, you may disagree with certain things, but there is very little case law on the limits of presidential pardon power. The president can even arguably pardon himself, which is scary. The president is arguably also immune from prosecution, which is also scary. But Dowd is supported by case law, the constitution, DOJ policy, and is acting in the best interest and almost certainly on the instructions of his client. If he is reminding the other side, "Hey, you might get a pardon," that is certainly bad optics, but it is not unethical or illegal. Others may likely disagree, but that is kind of my point -- you are constantly in a gray area.
Being a lawyer is very, very difficult. Being Trump's lawyer is probably impossible. I would need $1,000,000 per month.
But generally, for the rest of us, you basically get paid to inherit other people's HUGE problems and make very difficult judgment calls over the course of several years of litigation (it's a HUGE problem if they are paying you $200/hour or more to take care of it). But balanced with that is the fact that the client ultimately makes the decisions. That ramps up the difficulty even more.
If you are really curious, I would honestly welcome you to come spend a couple days with me in my office. I represent mostly civil clients but am on the public defender's list. You would probably lose your mind if you saw what happened in a prosecutor's office -- but that is what is supposed to happen. The prosecutor having a swing, the defense having a swing.
It's an extremely difficult way to make a living for the 95% of lawyers that don't make bank.