Seven Pa. lawyers involved in Trump’s legal fight to overturn the 2020 election are hit with ethics complaints

A legal advocacy group formed in hopes of disbarring and disciplining lawyers who aided Donald Trump’s push to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election filed complaints Thursday with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court against seven lawyers in the state for their involvement in the former president’s legal efforts.

The list of those targeted by the 65 Project include bit players like attorney and conservative talk show host Marc A. Scaringi, of Harrisburg, who sponsored Rudy Giuliani to argue on behalf of the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania’s federal courts, as well as some of the most in-demand GOP elections lawyers in the state, like Ronald Hicks and Carolyn McGee, who most recently represented Republican Senate candidate David McCormick in recount litigation during his primary campaign against Mehmet Oz.

Additionally, the group filed complaints against three out-of-state lawyers who participated in Pennsylvania election litigation — including Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who is now serving as a senior legal adviser to state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee in this year’s governor’s race.

All of them, the organization said in their filings, lent their “law license and the legal profession’s integrity and power to an orchestrated effort to undermine our nation’s elections.”

“It has now become part of the political toolbox for a candidate to allege fraud and seek to … undermine people’s faith in the outcome of elections any time they lose. We need to take that away,” said Michael Teter, managing director of the 65 Project, named after the 65 lawsuits filed in 2020 seeking to overturn the election. “The best way to do that with lawyers is to ensure there are personal or professional consequences to the actions they take.”

Thursday’s filings follow 11 similar complaints the 65 Project has filed with bar associations and disciplinary boards in other states against higher-profile targets involved in Trump’s 2020 fight like Ellis and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas).

Most of the targeted Pennsylvania attorneys did not respond to requests for comment. But Bruce S. Marks, a former Republican state senator from Philadelphia and GOP elections lawyer, described the complaint filed against him as “frivolous” and “vindictive.”

Marks was not directly involved in any of the post-election litigation that flooded Pennsylvania courts in late 2020. However, he advised the Trump campaign and on a 1993 case he brought and won involving one of his own elections, which he initially appeared to lose. A federal judge later reversed that outcome after determining Marks’ opponent had engaged in absentee ballot fraud.

During a November 2020 hearing in Williamsport, Marks briefly addressed the federal judge overseeing the Trump campaign’s primary lawsuit seeking to overturn the election in Pennsylvania. The 65 Project alleged in its complaint Thursday that in those proceedings he misrepresented the findings of his earlier case to the court.

“It is despicable that Democrat supported organizations are raising millions of dollars to falsely attack Republican attorneys in the hope that this will discourage us from representing Republican candidates in the future,” Marks said in a statement. “Our judicial system is founded on the right of Americans to have attorneys zealously represent them. This baseless complaint — the “cancel culture” at its worst — is a direct assault on that cherished right.”

Some legal scholars have also questioned the 65 Project’s tactics, worrying that their campaign — buttressed by TV ad buys and publicity-heavy rollouts of new complaints — upends the traditionally confidential process for attorney disciplinary proceedings.

”It’s unclear whether the point is to use the publicity and the website and the public nature of it to pressure disciplinary authorities to do something they might not otherwise do,” said Bruce Green, a legal ethics scholar at Fordham University, “or whether the point is to use the filing as a way to publicly shame lawyers.”

In Pennsylvania, the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates allegations of attorney misconduct for the state Supreme Court, keeps complaints against lawyers private until they are vetted and deemed to have merit. There are no prohibitions, however, on the filer of a complaint speaking publicly about it.

Teter defended his organization’s strategy, saying it was important for future elections to raise awareness about efforts to misuse the court system to add a sheen of legitimacy to baseless claims of election fraud. The 65 Project’s work is guided by an advisory board of prominent legal ethicists and attorneys, some of whom with conservative credentials.

“This effort is not just about the past,” Teter said. “Trump supporters are fighting to seize control of the state and local election process and the courts are a key part of their strategy to sabotage current and future elections.”

Most of the attorneys who were singled out by Teter’s group Thursday were involved in the Trump campaign’s primary lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s election results — Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar, a case that culminated in a Nov. 18, 2020, hearing in Williamsport before U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann.

Initially, the campaign’s suit — led by Hicks and McGee, Pittsburgh-based lawyers with the law firm Porter Wright, and Philadelphia attorney Linda Kerns — sought to delay certification of the state’s election results, citing what they described as mismanagement of the process by which votes were cast and counted.

But by the time of the hearing, all three had sought to withdraw from the case and Trump replaced them with lawyers like Giuliani who were more willing to embrace his false claims of widespread fraud and push for more drastic solutions — including a court order that would not just delay certification but set aside all 6.8 million votes cast that year.

Giuliani’s stumbling performance in court — in which he lobbed wild conspiracy theories about a cabal of Democratic officials who had conspired together to rig the outcome of the race in Pennsylvania with mail voting — bore little relation to anything his predecessors in the case had argued in their legal filings.

And despite his claims of fraud, he failed to allege — let alone provide evidence for — a single instance of a vote being illegally cast.

Eventually, Brann dismissed the case with a scathing opinion calling it a tortured “Frankenstein’s monster” of a legal theory seeking a remedy that he described as “unhinged.”

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” the judge wrote. “Instead, this court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by the evidence.”

His ruling was later affirmed by a three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which also took a dim view of the arguments and evidence the Trump campaign marshaled in support of their case.

“Calling an election unfair does not make it so,” Circuit Judge and Trump appointee Stephanos Bibas wrote for the panel. “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

In its disciplinary complaints Thursday against Hicks, McGee, and Kerns, The 65 Project argued that their departures from the case — before the campaign’s arguments reached their most extreme — should not absolve them.

“Withdrawing from the matter after helping light the fuse does not shield Mr. Hicks from responsibility,” the organization wrote, “nor does it alter the fact that appropriately disciplining him for this misconduct is an essential part of deterring future abuse.”

The other attorneys targeted by the 65 Project complaints Thursday include: