DC bar authorities file disciplinary charges against pro-Trump 2020 election lawyers

Washington, D.C., bar investigators have filed disciplinary charges against three lawyers who aided Donald Trump ally Sidney Powell’s campaign to mount discredited legal challenges to the 2020 election results.

Filings made public Friday accused attorneys Juli Haller, Lawrence Joseph and Brandon Johnson of making knowingly false representations to courts about a slew of lawsuits they filed in the weeks after the 2020 election.

Joseph was most directly involved in a lawsuit brought by then-Rep. Louie Gohmert against then-Vice President Mike Pence, seeking to force Pence’s hand as Trump was pressuring him to assert unprecedented authority to choose the winner of the election. The suit was dismissed by a federal district court judge and appeals court panel before stalling at the Supreme Court on Jan. 6, 2021.

Haller, meanwhile, was instrumental in Powell’s so-called “Kraken” lawsuits, the nickname she gave to the campaign of ultimately unsuccessful litigation aimed at undoing Joe Biden’s victories in several swing states. After her stint with Powell, Haller represented a handful of Jan. 6 defendants — including Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs, who was ultimately convicted of seditious conspiracy — before moving to America First Legal Foundation, the Trump-aligned outfit started by former White House adviser Stephen Miller.

Johnson joined Haller in many of the Powell-related lawsuits and filings.

The new charges are the latest in a series of disciplinary proceedings filed across the country against attorneys who directly and indirectly aided Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election. Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis was admonished by Colorado authorities after admitting to making false representations about election fraud in 2020. John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to block Biden’s Electoral College win, was found culpable for violating professional ethics after a lengthy trial in California and faces a final judgment in the next few weeks. And Rudy Giuliani was suspended from practicing law in New York and Washington, D.C. after proceedings that questioned his 2020 work on Trump’s behalf in Pennsylvania.

The new charges against Haller, Johnson and Joseph will be heard by a committee of the D.C. Bar, and if they’re found culpable they could face sanctions ranging from reprimand to suspension to disbarment.

Bar investigators say Haller and Johnson filed egregiously false claims about election fraud, particularly related to the contention that foreign governments and oligarchs had manipulated Dominion voting machines. Their claims were considered and rejected by courts at nearly every level in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere.

The attorneys “knew or should have known the lawsuits were frivolous,” the bar investigators charged. “They had no plausible factual basis for the claims they made and the relief they sought was unprecedented and beyond the authority of courts to grant.”

In a separate set of charges against Joseph, bar investigators say the conservative attorney falsely told courts that groups of pro-Trump presidential electors had been “duly qualified” in a handful of swing states, even though Biden had prevailed.

“[Joseph] knew that the claims about a ‘competing slate’ of electors in Arizona (as well as the slates in other ‘Contested States’) had no factual basis and was false,” they contend. “The state legislature in Arizona had not permitted, authorized, or endorsed the Republican slate of electors as competing or alternative electors for the state.”

Haller, Johnson and Joseph did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Haller and Johnson have been subject to disciplinary proceedings in other states as a result of their 2020 election litigation, including in Michigan, where a federal appeals court upheld sanctions against Powell and her allies.