Politics, Small Law Firms

Roy Moore's Lawyer Pens Demand Letter As Embarrassing As His Client

Words can't describe how terrible this letter is.

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It’s hard to believe that the former Chief Justice of Alabama doesn’t know a good lawyer. While he’s been kicked off that court — twice — one would have thought the Alabama legal community wasn’t so uniformly opposed to Moore that he couldn’t find a firm prepared to write a sober, respectable letter on his behalf. Alas, Moore’s turned to Trent Garmon instead and Garmon’s given us all such a gift by vomiting up an incoherent, error-filled, and typo laden demand letter.

And the fact that Roy Moore doubtless had to pay hundreds of dollars for this tripe makes it all worthwhile.

Please allow this to serve as notice that our firm has been retained to represent The Foundation for Moral Law, it’s President Kayla Moore and Chief Justice Roy Moore.

Didn’t even make it a sentence. Garmon could not make it a whole sentence without a basic grammatical f**k up. Obviously mistakes happen and over the course of a lengthy document, things will be missed in editing. But the first sentence. Come on, man.

Your client’s organization has made and/or supported defaming statements. This is due to the careless and/or intentionally refused to advance the truth regarding our clients. We also believe that your client, by and through its agents, have damaged our clients by being careless in how they handle headlines and report the contextual of the allegations.

I know 14-year-olds who write better. Sadly, Roy Moore might too.

Thus, do you know this clearly, yet significant difference which your client’s publication(s) have failed to distinguish. And the legal requirement that your client retract the stories, to include the details which clearly are false.

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Get this man a copy of Strunk & White stat. I’m fairly confident that this paragraph is asking the newspaper to retract its stories such that they then would include false details. Garmon probably didn’t intend this as an admission, but if he did, it’s very meta.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole letter. I originally started this post by redlining the letter, but after a couple of paragraphs it was clear that simple line editing couldn’t save this trainwreck.

Is there anything else you need to know about Trent Garmon? Oh, but of course there is! Let’s check out his bio:

Experience:

Trent completed his undergraduate at Troy University, graduating in Business with Honors. While at Troy University he started on their college football team as the center. This team played both Miami and Nebraska being the only team in the country to play the national champions and the runner up national champions in the same year. Some experts consider the 2001 Miami Hurricanes to be the greatest college football team in history. Trent also played Maryland, Central Florida and that year Troy beat Mississippi State on their homecoming. He played on the team with over a dozen athletes who ended up playing professionally in the NFL.

This is the opening paragraph of his bio. It’s about playing college football 16 years ago. And he didn’t even play in the SEC! Alabama has a deserved reputation for its college football obsession, but if you’re opening your professional bio as an attorney with Sun Belt war stories,[1] it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. He doesn’t even list a professional accomplishment until the third paragraph — the second paragraph mentions law school briefly before taking a hard right turn into his religious accomplishments.

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And those religious bona fides are sound. Here’s Garmon advising teachers of their “Christian rights” to harass homosexuals.

I’m starting to see why Roy Moore likes the cut of this guy’s jib.

Garmon has another thing in common with Moore! Let’s check out his disciplinary track record courtesy of Jacob Gershman’s Twitter feed:

Literal ambulance chasing. This is professional responsibility 101. The testimony of the victim’s mother is damning:

As I’m writing this Garmon’s just shown up on cable news trying to explain his client’s case and in a two minute span managed to be racist, caught in a lie, and drop an unnecessary football reference and we’re just going to have to do a follow-up on that so stay tuned. [UPDATE: Here’s our coverage of these cringe-worthy Garmon TV appearances.]

Roy Moore’s Lawyer Just Sent a Grammatical Apocalypse of a Letter Threatening Local Media [Slate]

[1] Actually the season he’s specifically talking about was the year before they even joined the Sun Belt. That year they were independent, having just moved up from I-AA.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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