A legal watchdog group has asked the State Bar of Georgia to discipline three attorneys who filed lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The 65 Project also filed an ethics complaint against a fourth Georgia attorney for the way he represented a star witness who testified before a U.S. House committee that investigated the events that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Meanwhile, the state bar has dismissed complaints against two “alternative” Trump presidential electors brought by the same group last year.
The flurry of complaints is a response to then-President Donald Trump’s extraordinary effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia and other swing states. That effort involved numerous unsuccessful lawsuits, a scheme to have state legislatures declare him the winner and — ultimately — an effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to deny or delay the certification of Biden’s victory.
Those events culminated in the attack on the Capitol, which has led to nearly 1,000 arrests on charges ranging from entering a restricted federal building to assault to seditious conspiracy.
The 65 Project — named for the 65 unsuccessful lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters — says it is seeking accountability for attorneys who aided Trump. It has filed ethics complaints against dozens of attorneys in various states.
The latest were filed Wednesday.
Three are similar complaints against Roswell attorney Kurt Hilbert and Atlanta attorneys Harry McDougald and Ray Smith III. They filed unsuccessful lawsuits that challenged Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, citing Trump’s dubious claims of voting fraud. The lawsuits were later dismissed or withdrawn.
The complaints say the lawsuits relied “solely on unfounded conspiracy theories, easily proven false, with no basis in law or fact.” They say the attorneys knew the lawsuits lacked merit but filed them anyway and violated several professional rules of conduct.
The complaints say the attorneys should be disciplined because they “served as part of a coordinated attempt to abuse the judicial system to promote and amplify bogus, unsupported claims of fraud to discredit an election that Mr. Trump lost.”
The attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
A fourth complaint alleges that Georgia attorney Stefan Passantino violated professional rules by encouraging client Cassidy Hutchinson — a Trump White House aide — to be less than forthcoming with congressional investigators.
Hutchinson told investigators that Passantino advised her to avoid providing information and declined to inform her he was being paid by Trump’s Save America PAC. The Project 65 complaint says Passantino put other people’s interests ahead of his client’s and “engaged in conduct that amounted to an obstruction of an investigation.”
Ross Garber, an attorney for Passantino, provided a lengthy written response to the complaint to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He noted that Hutchinson testified that Passantino “never told me to lie” or to commit perjury.
Garber said Hutchinson was aware that her legal fees were being paid by a third party and Passantino arranged for her to testify multiple times before the House committee. Garber’s statement accuses the Jan. 6 committee itself of improperly communicating with Hutchinson through a “back channel” to bypass Passantino, undermining her confidence in him.
Garber said the Project 65 complaint cherry-picked quotes from Hutchinson’s testimony out of context. He called the complaint “a transparent effort to smear a lawyer who has had a 30-year distinguished career” and said Passantino is “considering all legal options against its author and anyone who disseminates its contents.”
Meanwhile, the state bar has dismissed complaints against two other Georgia attorneys — William Bradley Carver of Atlanta and Daryl R. Moody of Alpharetta — brought by the 65 Project last year.
Carver and Moody served as “alternative” Republican presidential electors from Georgia. The electors met in December 2020 and voted for Trump even as the state’s official electors cast their ballots for Biden.
The fake electors scheme is the subject of criminal investigations by the U.S. Justice Department and the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office. The ethics complaint alleged that Carver and Moody had “disregarded the U.S. Constitution, violated federal and state law and ignored the judicial decisions.”
But the state bar found Carver and Moody were acting in a personal capacity, not as attorneys. It also found they had relied upon the representations of Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, who assured them the electors vote was needed to maintain Trump’s legal rights in a then-pending election challenge.
“I’m glad that the State Bar of Georgia dismissed this false complaint,” Carver said in a written statement to the AJC. “They applied the facts to the law and determined that my actions were neither unethical nor unprofessional. I am grateful for their objectivity and wisdom in doing so, especially in such a fraught political environment.”
Moody did not respond to a request for comment.
Another complaint filed by the same group against attorney William McCall Calhoun Jr. of Americus apparently is still pending. Calhoun faces federal criminal charges for his actions at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
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