The Justice Department wants to handle ethics complaints against its own lawyers internally, bypassing independent review. This would let government attorneys lie in court without outside consequences, eroding a key check on executive power. Federal judge Deborah Pearlston told the New York Times she's lost confidence in government lawyers' truthfulness.
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The Justice Department is now backing a proposal that critics say would make it harder to hold government lawyers accountable when they mislead or even lie to the courts. Under the idea, ethics complaints against Justice Department attorneys could be diverted away from independent state bar investigators and routed into the department's own internal review system. That matters because lawyers are not supposed to function like political spokespersons. They have a professional duty to tell courts the truth. According to critics, this change would weaken one of the few remaining checks on executive power by insulating government attorneys from meaningful outside discipline. The concern is bigger than any single brief or hearing. If judges cannot trust the government lawyers standing in front of them, then the legal system itself starts to corrode. Courts rely on facts, candor, and professional consequences for dishonesty. Removing these guardrails and the executive branch gains even more room to manipulate the truth without paying a price. Okay, it's very easy these days to get intimidated by people saying, oh, you criticize the Trump administration, you suffer Trump Derangement Syndrome. Uh, you're saying these people are worse than, uh, certain figures in 1940s Germany. Okay, timeout, folks. There is such a thing as a slide from liberal democracy to authoritarian regimes. There is such a thing as going from a liberal democracy, or even a republic, to a dictatorship, to an authoritarian regime. It's happened in a lot of places. It has certainly happened in places like Hungary, which is a great country. I've been there many times. But it's not really a democracy. Now, a wit once said, democracy is where an incumbent can lose an election. If you have an election and the incumbent can't lose, it's not really a democracy. That's essentially what has happened in Russia. That's what has happened in Hungary. And it's what many people fear is about to happen in the United States. And when you give lawyers who work for the Department of Justice the ability to lie, to just say, Candidate X got more votes in the 2020 election than Candidate Y, and the facts don't bear that out, you have a real problem. Because political figures, politicians can say things, but when you are an attorney in a court of law, you're supposed to be held to a higher standard. We are supposed to be a country based on the rule of law. The rule of law has rules for lawyers and what they do in courtrooms. They can't just lie. They can make a defense. Using facts selectively in certain contexts, but you can't out-tell, you can't just out-and-out tell a lie. And what we've seen from this administration again and again and again is an insistence to tell lies. It starts from the top, it filters down to the Attorney General, now it's filtering down to every aspect of the Department of Justice. And if you call yourself a conservative, if you consider yourself a libertarian, if you believe in rule of law, democracy, and capitalism, this should concern you. A great deal because this is a proposal, it's complex, it's not going to be the number one thing debated on CNN or MSNBC or even Fox. It did get some play in the New York Times today, but this is a profound change. Here's what one federal judge had to say about this, talking to the Times. The court is left with little confidence that government lawyers can be trusted to tell the truth about anything. Deborah Pearlston also told the Times, rules requiring lawyers to serve as honest officers of the court have been adopted by every state and the District of Columbia, and now this Trump Department of Justice wants to change that. Facts, no less than law, constrain government power. If government attorneys can just lie and get away with it and not face professional censure, not risk getting their bar license taken away, it gives even more power to an executive branch to say and do anything they want. And that, my friends, is pretty much the end of democracy. It's certainly the end of the rule of law.
