(Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)
Husch Blackwell has heard your concerns and wants to assure you everything is just fine. As you may recall, earlier this week news broke that an attorney at Husch Blackwell, Lane Ruhland, was spotted delivering to Wisconsin officials signatures to put Kanye West on the presidential ballot. Maybe not the high-powered work you’d expect from a Biglaw attorney, but certainly nothing untoward about it. But then you learn Ruhland, along with others at Husch, represent the Donald Trump reelection campaign.
Let’s drop those receipts, as the kids say, because this just never gets old:
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“No comment” as woman enters election commission building just after 5p in Madison to drop off signatures for Kanye West pic.twitter.com/zVxePn5Fe2
— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) August 4, 2020
Lane Ruhland, the Wisconsin lawyer who dropped off Kanye West's presidential filing at the Wisconsin Board of Elections represented Donald Trump's presidential campaign exactly one week before in federal court pic.twitter.com/RHajkRDiMO
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 5, 2020
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Apparently working for multiple presidential candidates raised some questions among the rank and file at Husch. According to an email circulated internally, firm leadership made clear that a conflicts check was run for the representation of Kanye West and/or his 2020 presidential campaign. They make no mention of how, exactly, this squares with representing another 2020 presidential candidate — and not just representing him on a firm level, the same attorney is apparently working for multiple candidates — for example if conflicts were disclosed and waived or if there’s a limited scope to the representation. Just trust that the conflict has been cleared.
But the firmwide email also makes clear that the “controversial” aspect of the representation (though it isn’t clear if they’re talking about the Kanye campaign or the Trump campaign) isn’t something they particularly care about. And “representation of clients is not an endorsement of said clients’ cultural or political viewpoints.”
You can read the full email below.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).