Government

Donald Trump Drags Biglaw Firm Into Middle Of Election Interference Effort

Foley & Lardner unveils innovative new election fraud practice!!!

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(Photo by Andrew Harrer – Pool/Getty Images)

Leaked audio obtained by the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught Donald Trump harassing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to accept a string of already debunked election fraud myths and to just “find 11,780 votes” that would deliver Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump. Is that a violation of both state and federal election laws? ALMOST ASSUREDLY! Was there a lawyer on the call who failed to protect her client from running face first into potential criminal liability? YUP!

But what made this call so incredible is that the lawyer Trump chose to bring with him wasn’t drawn from the bumbling crew of free agents willing to trade their professional credibility for an opportunity to leak hair dye on national television, but Foley & Lardner’s Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell was already brazenly spreading myths about “voter fraud” on all the networks that Trump likes to watch, so it was perhaps inevitable that he’d reach out. What wasn’t inevitable is that a Biglaw firm would allow one of their partners to officially drag them into this mess.

This isn’t the first time Mitchell’s practice has put Foley & Lardner in the hot seat. She was caught on tape running a gerrymandering seminar where she advised state legislators to destroy their notes before they go home so they won’t become part of a discovery request. Document retention policies are, fundamentally, about making sure material doesn’t end up getting produced, but it’s a considerable leap from “we delete all your emails older than six months” to “don’t take notes because we’re about to commit some civil rights violations.” That’s some Stringer Bell stuff right there.

But gerrymandering is the polite form of disenfranchisement. It’s the sort of thing Ben Ginsberg could devote his life to and still get a pat on the back from MSNBC. Leaning on state election officials to conjure up favorable votes is a lot harder for a major law firm to spin.

You know things are bad when the emerging social media narrative in defense of the call is that it was “criminal” for the Georgia SoS office to leak the conversation to the newspapers. Georgia is a one-party consent jurisdiction so they could record and leak whatever they wanted to. The more high-minded conservatives out there realize this and have moved on to casting this as a “settlement negotiation,” which is not privileged or confidential. The fact that settlement negotiations may be excluded as evidence at trial doesn’t do squat when it comes to emailing an audio file to the Post. Look, if lobbing criminal threats in settlement negotiations were off-limits, Michael Avenatti would be in much better shape.

In fairness to Mitchell, she did push back on some of Trump’s nuttiest statements, noting that they don’t “know” some of the wild statements to be true. But these moments were few and far between as she leaned into claims of 18,000 ballots being counted in secret and Dominion voting machines. And she definitively did not clamp down her client while he explicitly said that he’s uninterested in facially neutral solutions to improve the vote count and just wants the state to “find” him enough votes.

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Trump: No, we do have a way, but I don’t want to get into it. We found a way . . . excuse me, but we don’t need it because we’re only down 11,000 votes, so we don’t even need it. I personally think they’re corrupt as hell. But we don’t need that. All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes. So we don’t need that. I’m not looking to shake up the whole world.

Jones Day had better send Foley & Lardner a fruit basket. When folks started to pressure Jones Day’s clients for doing business with the law firm that laid the groundwork for all the frivolous voting challenges this cycle (and I wondered why any mainstream transactional partner wasn’t immediately trying to port their business somewhere with less drama) the firm entered a feeble damage control effort and hunkered down hoping that all this would blow over. Maybe that strategy has paid off, because now they can confidently say that they may have tried to systematically disenfranchise Americans, but at least their clients weren’t on tape encouraging a state official to commit voter fraud!

And, yes, that’s what this was. Politico even checked in on Georgia’s criminal code:

Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor, said: “The Georgia code says that anybody who solicits, requests or commands or otherwise attempts to encourage somebody to commit election fraud is guilty of solicitation of election fraud. ‘Soliciting or requesting’ is the key language. The president asked, in no uncertain terms, the secretary of state to invent votes, to create votes that were not there. Not only did he ask for that in terms of just overturning the specific margin that Joe Biden won by, but then said we needed one additional vote to secure victory in Georgia.”

Early yesterday, an in-house counsel posted on Twitter that his company would terminate its relationship with Foley & Lardner immediately. This is, of course, what every client should do to law firms offering aid and succor to election interference. Someone will surely trot out the “well, everyone deserves a lawyer” canard in a ploy to protect Foley & Lardner from facing the natural and logical consequences of its actions. But just because a lawyer as a professional can represent troubling clients — unless, of course, the lawyer as a professional was actively encouraging a client to go down a potentially criminal path, which would be much, much worse for a firm — the firm as a business doesn’t get a pass if they trade their goodwill with public-facing corporate clients to collect some fast bucks supporting a coup. It’s a straightforward business and branding issue and firms that take cases like these have to deal with the fallout.

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And Foley & Lardner’s brand right now isn’t looking great.

‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor [Washington Post]

Earlier: Biglaw Partner On Fox News Peddling Tales Of Voter Fraud
GOP Lawyer Slams Trump For Undermining Election Confidence Despite Long Career Of Undermining Election Confidence
Yesterday Was The Day America Learned What We’ve Known About Jones Day All Along

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior 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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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