May 06, 2022 08:49 AM UTC

They're Coming For Jenna Ellis' Law License (Finally)

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post’s Conrad Swanson reports, a national legal advocacy group has finally taken a step we’ve been awaiting for over a year now, and filed a formal complaint with the Colorado Supreme Court’s Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel over the conduct of locally-registered attorney Jenna Ellis as part of Donald Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election:

The bipartisan watchdog group States United Democracy Center filed a complaint against Ellis Thursday with the Colorado Supreme Court’s Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, asking for an investigation into whether she violated her ethical obligations as an attorney.

After the election Ellis “knowingly spread falsehoods” about its results; helped Trump try to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results by providing “misleading legal advice;” and “amplifying false theories of voter fraud.”

…Ellis could not immediately be reached for comment and it was not immediately clear whether she still lives in Colorado. She has passed the state’s bar examinations, though, and is currently permitted to practice law in Colorado.

Here’s more from the release announcing the complaint filed yesterday:

The complaint offers a detailed analysis of information that strongly supports the request to open an investigation into whether Ellis violated her professional and ethical obligations as an attorney. It focuses on her efforts to convince then-Vice President Pence to refuse to open and count lawfully certified electoral votes from six states on January 6, 2021, at the Joint Session of Congress. The complaint also describes Ellis’ attempts to falsely discredit the 2020 presidential election as fraudulent.

“Jenna Ellis called herself a member of former President Trump’s ‘elite strike force team’ and used her law license to advise Trump and others on how to overturn the will of the American people,” said Aaron Scherzer, Senior Counsel at the States United Democracy Center. “Postponing the counting of electoral votes as Ellis recommended was unlawful and would have had devastating consequences for our democracy.”

…More than a dozen bipartisan legal experts and former state leaders signed on in support of the complaint’s request that the OARC open an investigation into Ellis’ conduct. The list of signers includes the States United leadership team—Co-Chair Norm Eisen, former Ethics Czar in the Obama White House, Co-Chair Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey Governor, and CEO Joanna Lydgate, former Chief Deputy Attorney General of Massachusetts—as well as Governor Steve Bullock, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Representative Tom Coleman, the Honorable Frankie Sue Del Papa, Professor Claire Finkelstein, the Honorable Jim Hood, the Honorable Patricia A. Madrid, Professor Richard W. Painter, the Honorable Sarah Saldaña, and Professor Laurence H. Tribe.

The lead attorney in Trump’s fight to overturn the 2020 elections, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, had his law license suspended in both New York and the District of Columbia in June of 2021 due to Giuliani’s “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large.” In March of this year, the California State Bar announced an investigation against former CU visiting scholar John Eastman that could result in the forteiture of Eastman’s license to practice law in that state.

From spreading baseless allegations of election fraud on national television to authoring her own memo for a plan to throw the certification of Joe Biden’s victory into parliamentary chaos on January 6th, 2021, Jenna Ellis would seem to be every bit as guilty of professional misconduct as Giuliani and Eastman. Ellis’ responses to scrutiny over her role in Trump’s coup plot, even while colleagues in the effort face career-ending sanctions, have consisted mostly of grade-school inanity:

All we can say is, the loss of Ellis’ law license might put an end to the smugness. At this point, having capitalized on her instant stardom as Trump’s coup-torney to emerge as a Newsmax talking head with (we assume) a much better salary, Ellis might not even care if she loses her license to practice law in Colorado.

But at least she won’t be able to call herself a “constitutional law attorney” while everyone who knows better groans.