Litigators

Just Because You're Defending Nazis Doesn't Mean You Have To Be A Prick About It

I get that Nazis need good lawyers, but good lawyers don't have to like it.

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(Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Alex Jones, the InfoWars guy, has lawyered-up anew, as Sandy Hook families pursue their lawsuits against him for defamation. Jones has claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting, where 27 people, including 20 children were murdered, was a “hoax.”

The New York Times ran a profile on his new lawyers, in part because they’re the same guys who defended the mainstream Republican — fine, “neo-Nazi” — publication, Daily Stormer. First Amendment lawyers Marc Randazza and Jay Wolman of the Las Vegas-based Randazza Legal Group are handling Jones’s defense in Connecticut.

Full disclosure time: I know Marc Randazza. I’ve done podcasts with Marc Randazza. Marc Randazza has defended this website.

And I respect what he’s doing. No, I don’t agree. I don’t think he should be doing it. Just because Nazis deserve a legal defense doesn’t mean you’re a good person for defending them. But, to contrast Randazza with another prominent legal defender of the alt-white takeover, Alan Dershowitz just says aggressive bunk on television to television hosts without the legal training to contradict him and then cries that his friends on Marthas Vineyard treat him like a pariah who supports baby kidnapping. Randazza does his Nazi dance in court, and he doesn’t cry when decent people shun him. While Dershowitz only gets up if rich and famous people are in trouble, Randazza doesn’t reserve an absolutist stand on the First Amendment solely for Nazis and other assorted Deplorables — if you think you live in a world where you can say anything you want without consequences, Randazza is there for you. I can respect that. I think of Randazza like the “evil Michael Avenatti,” and I mean that as a compliment.

But you can defend deplorable people without adopting and promoting their deplorable logic. There’s a difference. The legal community does not talk about that difference very much: lawyers shun deplorable lawyers, and deplorable lawyers put their heads so far up their own ass that they think any suggestion of restraint smells bad. But we can draw a line of demarcation around zealous legal defense and ridiculous alt-white dogma.

For me, that line is right here:

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“We are going to be mounting a strong First Amendment defense and look forward to this being resolved in a civil and collegial manner,” [Randazza] said, asserting that Mr. Jones has “a great deal of compassion for these parents.”

No, Alex Jones does not have “compassion” for the families of Sandy Hook victims. Saying he does is a lie. Alex Jones has argued that the parents of Sandy Hook victims are FAKING the death of their own children. That means he has no compassion for their suffering. That’s not a difference of opinion, that’s not a certain point of view, that’s a straight lie designed by the alt-right so that the assholes who support Alex Jones can tell themselves that they aren’t going to end up in Hell for their terrible beliefs.

It’s a lie that all lawyers, no matter how steeped they are in Nazi appeasement, have no duty to repeat. If you are going to make your career along the lawyerly duty to give the most disgusting among us a competent legal defense, then stick to the law. If you have a First Amendment argument, MAKE IT, and leave the rehabilitation of Alex Jones’s character to Donald Trump. If you want to argue that Jones’s didn’t have “actual malice” when flinging his wild conspiracies, fine, make that case IN COURT where you can be held to a standard of EVIDENCE for your ridiculous assertions.

That’s the problem with all of these (overwhelmingly white) law-talking guys who have fallen over themselves to get on TV and defend Trump and his apostles. These people are freaking giddy to run around making white supremacist legal arguments, trying to peacock how contrarian they can be, and how intellectually consistent they can be. They are the “Mussolini made the trains run on time” folks of our generation, proud of their ability to defend the indefensible by shifting the argument to technical instead of moral grounds. Most of these lawyers don’t even HAVE clients. They’re representing white supremacists on television for fun.

There is a time and place for the banality of their evil, and that place is COURT. Court is the place where we have stylized arguments about the technical legality of proposed atrocities. Nobody blames Noel Francisco for the Muslim Ban (I mean, I do, but I’m the kind of guy you don’t want on your Committee for Public Safety). To most people, Francisco is just a lawyer who had a job to do. He’s just Smilin’ Jack Ross: “I represent the government of the United States without passion or prejudice and my client has a case!”

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If you want to represent detestable clients, fine. But when you go out into the media and don’t just defend them but actually adopt their logic and moral arguments, that’s different. Then, it looks like you agree with them. And if you agree with them, you can no longer avail yourself of the lawyerly presumption that you are just doing your job. Instead of being a mere part of the process, you become part of the problem.

Think about doctors. Doctors have a moral and ethical responsibility to treat people. If a Nazi shows up in an emergency room, the doctors on call have a responsibility to try to save his life. But what if you are a plastic surgeon? What if you are a plastic surgeon and a Nazi shows up in your office, looking for elective surgery to help him evade capture by the moral forces of the world? If the surgeon performed that procedure, you’d be right to think of the plastic surgeon as reprehensible and not much better than the Nazi he aided.

Vile clients can have good legal arguments, but their lawyers have no ethical responsibility to disguise their clients or repeat the lies their clients tell.

Lawyers for Neo-Nazi to Defend Alex Jones in Sandy Hook Case [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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