Story Time
In certain ways, the proverbial fun—or, as the translators insist,
shitshow—just keeps coming. Today, we consider John Pierce, an attorney who appears to be collecting Wednesday Putsch clients. Scuttlebutt suggests his clientele are accused insurrectionists who could implicate a prominent Proud Boy named Joe Biggs. This part of the story seems both normal and suspicious, but it is easy to get distracted by that; as
Emptywheel↱ put it, "John Pierce Tries to Hire His 18th January 6 Defendant while on a Ventilator with COVID-19".
It's a lot of clients, something like seventeen, with two more having left him for new counsel. Again, Emptywheel: "Representing this many defendants would be an impossible feat, even for the most experienced defense attorney, and harder still for a civil attorney like Pierce." Moreover, there are apparent conflicts between the defendants that might complicate or challenge Pierce's standing to represent them all. Furthermore, the question might arise that an attorney is pitching to clients while hospitalized with Covid; to be clear, according to Ryan Marshall, who stood in Pierce's place this week, advised the court Mr. Pierce is "non-responsive". Nonetheless, in yesterday's hearing the court was advised that a defendent, Nate DeGrave, intended to release his public defender and take up the nonresponsive, ventilated Mr. Pierce as his attorney.
And it is worth taking the moment to consider the idea of competent legal representation; with attorneys for Trump or arguing his cause facing court sanctions and even potential disbarrment, the broader spectacle is hard to describe, but there is at least a whiff in the air that some right-wing activists are so far out on a limb they require infamous and problematic defenses.
It's one thing if, for instance, Trump-supporting election lawyers face sanctions including possible disbarment in Michigan, but stand-in Marshall, while apparently an attorney somewhere, does not have bar standing in the District of Columbia. Furthermore, the
detail emerges↱ that Ryan Marshall is also awaiting trial in Pennsylvania, on what looks like twenty-two counts of fraud, theft, conspiracy, and racketeering, apparently arising from his conduct as a judicial clerk.
And here we come to the crux of it, because we at Sciforums are familiar with rightist politics and their absurd excuses, and we see writ large what it all comes to in the world outside our virtual window. The January 6 insurrectionists generally cannot make arguments coherent unto themselves, justifying themselves with
ad hoc arrangements of dubious, specious, and even notorious arguments that do not necessarily work and play well with each other. And if the putschskis, having achieved at least this climax, now find themselves unable to clean up the mess, it is not insignicant how much of their circumstance is brought by insupportable, specious pretenses of argument. It's one thing if reputable legal advice tells them they're in trouble, but look at what it takes to find a proverbial second opinion.
†
It might seem strange, then, to reach back to the last century and remind of the Tulia debacle, when local law enforcement went after the town's black community on make-believe drug charges, on the word of a white deputy who could not provide any actual evidence of the drug transactions, and apparently used for himself the drugs he allegedly confiscated, and, oh, yeah, had been fired from his previous job in law enforcement for stealing from a sheriff's office.
The point of recalling Tulia, of course, is simply to remind that the dysfunctionally low ethic is not new, and actually seems a hallmark of American conservatism, or, at least, traditionalism.
To the one, sure, it seems and definitely felt in its time like a hard accusation, that the conservative ethic is somehow irredeemably broken; but over the last twenty-five years, at least, we have watched this spectacle go on. Many have even labored to abet it, pretending it would be somehow unfair to not equivocate falsehood in order to advance or, at the very least, refuse to disqualify it. Generally speaking, it's not unreasonable to reach back forty years; what emerged in conservative fits during the Nineties was distilled influence of the Reagan Awakening in 1980.
Think of it this way: It is true that frailty is a nonpartisan human trait, but there is a clear difference between the person who is susceptible to particular harm and the person trying to inflict it. There is a difference between the person who can be deceived, and the person who seeks to deceive. In American politics, it's true you can find me a "liberal" dumbass, but the implications of being a dumbass of any political outlook are observably different from being one who knowingly propagates dumbassery. The failure to distinguish this basic difference between
frailty and
infliction, the
fact of frailty and the
exploitation thereof, is a significant factor in understanding much of the American conservative politic.
And if we wonder where on the spectrum of victimhood and culpability these rightist-insurrectionists occur, it is one thing that they are frail enough to believe this or that swindle, but there is also the question of their willingness to inflict and propagate, and participate in the grift.
Perhaps it seems like sweeping generalization to wonder about who benefits from the kind of confusion, futility, and antisociality on display in the Wednesday Putsch, but the Trump administration and subsequent insurrection are the fruit nourished by failure and cultivated of frailty.
Or maybe it seems abrupt to point a finger at the stranger than fiction, previously unbelievable tales of attorneys like Alan Dershowitz ruining their reputations; or Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and others risking their actual credentials; or the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani—politically beloved American icon of law and order,
a.k.a., "America's Mayor"—denigrating himself to the point of prosecutorial scrutiny; the question never really goes away.
There is an idea that
a justification tells us what we need to know about the ethic↗; the idea is a fairly straightforward observation of what seems problematic:
Well, sure, but look at what I must [believe/accept/abet] in order to justify that outcome. An example would be the proposition that it would be "just plain stupid" to
not lie on an official document, and, sure, we get it, but everything about the incident tells us something about the ethics involved. Funny thing about that, the example includes a Member of Congress widely named in murmur and buzz accusing a role in the insurrection, and that, too, would make some sort of point.
And, yes, the idea of an arraigned racketeer not admitted to the local bar standing in for an incapacitated, nonresponsive, ventilated attorney tells us something about the conditions of these defendants' cases.
†
Vis à vis the question who stormed the U.S. Capitol, it was, clearly, rightist Trump supporters, and what we are finding out over the time since is that they were, in fact,
motivated by supremacism and assorted craziness↗, and, yes, it does seem something of a self-aware dysfunction. One of the problems we find when spelunking these rabbit holes is that excuses from culpability start to look and sound like pleading noncompetency; the difference between mark and grifter, between the fact of human frailty and their participation in the exploitation thereof, eventually starts to sound like they just couldn't help it because they weren't capable of understanding what was going on.
For the rest of society, the question might be the same asa it ever was: What excuses can we make for these people, today?
The story of what Mr. Pierce thinks he is doing is probably fascinating; and should he live through this as we hope he will, the question remains whether he would ever tell us, truthfully, what he was trying to do. The Hollywood version is likely a farce facing executive pushback for being unbelievable.
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Notes:
@alanfeuer. "As it happens, Ryan Joseph Marshall, the lawyer who is handling John Pierce's cases as he fights COVID in the hospital, is awaiting trial in Pennsylvania on multiple charges of theft, fraud & conspiracy related to a prior job as a judicial law clerk." Twitter. 25 August 2021. Twitter.com. 25 August 2021. https://bit.ly/3guhT8o
Emptywheel. "John Pierce Tries to Hire His 18th January 6 Defendant while on a Ventilator with COVID-19". The Empty Wheel. 25 August 2021. EmptyWheel.net. 25 August 2021. https://bit.ly/2XYcL5V
