Justice Department lawyers may soon pay a high price for lying to the courts

[Gothmog]

49. Sometimes a Justice Department lawyer must just say 'no'

From the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/08/somtimes-doj-lawyer-must-just-say-no/?utm_term=.8047534f232a

Mimi Rocah, a former prosecutor, surmises: “There are DOJ lawyers not willing to lose their integrity with the courts for Trump. I’m proud to see that. And judges will notice too.”

Others agree that swapping out lawyers is highly unusual. “It’s extraordinary and downright bizarre to see the government parachute in new lawyers at this late stage of the litigation,” says legal scholar Joshua Matz. “If past is prologue, this may indicate that we’re about to see some extremely sketchy moves that the existing team was unwilling to take for professional or reputational reasons.” That the administration would have to go so far afield, to recruit consumer protection lawyers, “suggests that the entire federal programs branch of the Justice Department is unwilling to defend whatever the administration plans to file.”

This is not the first time in this presidency a set of lawyers has dropped out of a case brought on specious grounds. In the case seeking to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act, three career attorneys withdrew without signing onto a brief many considered legally preposterous.....

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what these lawyers do will have profound consequences for the country and their careers. Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe warns, “The Department of Justice cannot avoid the long-term credibility cost to its litigating posture of contradicting itself in successive filings simply by changing the names of the career DOJ lawyers on the pleadings or by bringing new faces into court. If that’s the aspiration, it’s not going to succeed.”

The new team of lawyers should think very carefully before accepting an assignment from an attorney general not above misrepresenting the work of a special counsel or adopting the role of the president’s private counsel.