Subject: Re: Additional Co-Conspirators
This lawyer should be removed from this case and IMMEDIATELY disbarred for attempting to taint public perception of the court's integrity and for materially interfering with other potential witnesses in the case. There are likely criminal charges involved here as well but there is no way this lawyer should ever enter a court as a lawyer ever again.

Ummmm....I'm not so sure about that. I'm pretty sure that nothing he did was criminal. He probably didn't even violate and civil laws. It's entirely possible that he didn't even violate any bar rules or ethical requirements.

I mean, we know that there wasn't previously a protective order. The judge acknowledged that there wasn't much case law on the degree to which pre-trial discovery could be prohibited from being disseminated in totality. I don't ever go to court, so I don't know what the rules are about disclosing pre-trial discovery are. Googling hasn't been much help....but from what I've been able to piece together, I'm pretty sure that there isn't a general total prohibition on disclosing pre-trial evidence. That's why motions for a protective order exist - if you don't want defense counsel to go blabbing to the press about what's going on in the case, you have to ask the judge to stop them from doing so. It doesn't seem to just happen automatically because prosecutors might prefer it that way.

The prosecutors argued (correctly) that these specific disclosures run the risk of witness intimidation or jeopardizing the fair trial by tainting a jury pool with inadmissible evidence. Those are good arguments....but those are arguments in favor of asking the court to block the disclosure of specific categories of evidence through a protective order. They're not arguments that there already exists a rule, standard, obligation, or law against disclosing pre-trial evidence altogether.

We'll know more in the next couple of days - but reading the exchange between the judge and the lawyer, it would not shock me if the lawyer wasn't even punished by the judge in this case. Let alone having his ticket pulled.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/...