The opening weekend of our annual tournament is in the books, delivering some close calls and even an upset! For those who missed it, we set up a small bracket challenge, in the spirit of March Madness, to determine which Trump lawyer most deserves to lose their law license. Administration lawyers have lied or otherwise misled tribunals across the country, defied or encouraged defying court orders, breached basic rules of prosecutorial responsibility, and more.
There is no mechanism to probe and punish this behavior except for state bar authorities to implicate the law licenses of these attorneys for breaching rules of professional responsibility. It may well be that nothing can halt this bad behavior, but there’s a chance that throwing a wrench in their plans for a lucrative revolving door private sector legal job could give them pause. Or at the very least protect the public going forward.
So, as the first round of our little tournament concludes, we say goodbye to half the field. But remember that it’s not whether you win or lose, but what we learn about their colorably unethical conduct along the way!
ROY COHN REGION
1 Pam Bondi v. 4 James Percival
No surprises here as the top seeded Attorney General rolls over Homeland Security’s General Counsel. Percival likely raked up a handful of votes, from those who believe that the DOJ — whatever its faults — has not acted with the level of brazen lawlessness that DHS has. It’s a fair argument, but, like most of the legal arguments advanced by DHS, it failed to carry the day.
2 Ed Martin v. 3 Brendan Carr
By less than a hundred votes, FCC Chair Brendan Carr upsets Ed Martin! An epic takedown because Martin came into the tournament with a truly impressive resume, having used his authority to drop charges against his own former client and issue threats where he admitted no criminal liability existed. He’s also the only participant in the pool that even the DOJ felt necessary to remove from his position based on an internal investigation. But in a battle of guys extra thirsty for media attention, Martin’s excesses couldn’t move the needle like Carr’s. Carr is firing off legal threats to sink Jimmy Kimmel for making jokes about Trump and threatening news organizations for accurately reporting on the Iran war. Can he pull off another upset?
1 Lindsey Halligan v. 4 Drew Ensign
In a battle of malicious incompetence vs. malicious competence, incompetence won. Halligan beclowned herself as the phony U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, launching dubious investigations into the president’s enemies and then screwing them up so badly that they all got tossed. A federal judge told her she wasn’t legally in the job and she kept showing up to work anyway until yet another judge told her to go home. Meanwhile, Ensign has conducted himself superficially normally in court while advancing the administration’s least defensible positions, including telling a judge that he didn’t know about deportation flights when a whistleblower places him at the very meeting discussing those flights.
2 Alina Habba v. 3 Steven Vandervelden
Arguably the scariest 2 seed in the tournament, Habba was overdue for a disciplinary review before illegally squatting in the New Jersey U.S. Attorney job. A federal judge imposed $1 million in sanctions against the former parking garage lawyer as part of Trump’s legal team in the frivolous RICO claim against Hillary Clinton. Her stint as NJ’s top federal prosecutor also ended with a judicial benchslap. Vandervelden, meanwhile, can return to his photography business and forget his disastrous attempt to come out of retirement to prosecute lawmakers for accurately describing law.
1 Todd Blanche v. 4 David Warrington
Another crush for the DOJ’s senior leadership. Blanche rolled over the competition like it was threatening Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous pedophile that Todd Blanche is working overtime to protect, despite the explicit text of a congressional statute. Warrington has really done an amazing job of staying below the radar given that his official role as White House counsel puts him at the center of every legal debacle across the administration. But it’s time for Warrington to go home, just like all the January 6 rioters that he got pardoned. With this loss, ASS Law is now out of the tournament.
2 Jeanine Pirro v. 4 Kash Patel
Less than 20 votes separated these two. In the end, the only U.S. Attorney in the tournament who actually holds that job legally managed to clip the FBI Director. Pirro has managed to make a mockery of the time-honored maxim that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich by bringing cases so frivolous that grand juries take the unusual step of rejecting the bill out of hand. In one instance, Pirro managed to get a unanimous rejection from a grand jury! Patel, meanwhile, is not acting as a lawyer these days, but he still must adhere to the rules binding the rest of us if he ever hopes to practice. Ultimately, his not-technically-lawyering status may have kept him from moving on.
1 Emil Bove v. 4 Harmeet Dhillon
Bove technically left the administration when he became a Third Circuit judge, but since he continues to openly carry himself as a partisan representative of the administration, he stayed in the bracket. As the former administration official who reportedly instructed DOJ lawyers to respond to court orders by telling federal judges “f*** you,” Bove didn’t need a long tenure at DOJ to present a colorable case for disciplinary inquiry. Dhillon’s work dismantling the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division may be objectionable and run afoul of statutory edicts, but she’s mostly spent her time in catty Twitter fights hoping to generate more followers than misrepresenting the record in court. So this one felt inevitable.
2 Chad Mizelle v. 3 John Sarcone
The man who wants to recruit future AUSAs by having them slide into his DMs slides into the next round. Mizelle left his role as DOJ Chief of Staff with up to $250,000 in undisclosed conflicts of interest involving companies the DOJ was actively suing or investigating, including Apple, Meta, and Visa. Sarcone, meanwhile, holds the distinction of being the only fake prosecutor on this list to continue pretending to hold his job. A federal judge this month kept an order in place blocking Sarcone from issuing subpoenas to harass Trump enemies while the Second Circuit considers the legality of his appointment.
We’ll unveil the new matchup polls on Thursday, but in the meantime, here’s where that puts our tournament right now.
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