With some exceptions, part of the bundle of burdens assumed when becoming a member of the guild is to adhere to the Rules of Professional Conduct. This is one of the basic requirements that distinguishes a profession from an occupation. You have to pass the bar examination to become a lawyer, and subsequently abide by the rules to remain one.

Auditioning Attorney General Todd Blanche, on the taxpayers’ dime, rejects the notion that lawyers working for the Trump administration should be held to the rules of professional responsibility, and he’s suing the District of Columbia bar to stop it from disciplining Jeffrey Clark, the former environmental law assistant at DoJ willing to pretend that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump when no one else would, and Ed Martin, for his abusing his position at DoJ to attack Georgetown Law School, which barely scratches the surface of Martin’s sleaze.

In accompanying statements, Mr. Blanche accused the D.C. Bar of acting as a “blatantly partisan arm of leftist causes.” Mr. Woodward said that the bar would “no longer be permitted to probe sensitive executive branch deliberations,” adding that lawyers in the federal government must “be free to share their candid legal advice with their bosses and colleagues.”

That position — that lawyers at the Justice Department or other federal agencies are above scrutiny by legal ethics officials — is likely to be challenged by a host of legal profession entities.

Can you be a lawyer and, at the same time, be immune from scrutiny for violating one of the fundamental facets of the profession? What if the Trump administration decided that its lawyers need not pass the bar exam, but if the administration decided that a person was a lawyer, education and testing notwithstanding, a lawyer they shall be? After all, Trump has already issued an Executive Order claiming to be the final arbiter of what the law shall be, and prohibiting anyone in his administration from challenging or disputing it. The law is what Trump says it is, so why shouldn’t lawyers be who Trump says they are. And legal ethics has nothing to do with it.

In the suit, Blanche challenges the DC Bar by claiming it’s a “blatantly partisan arm of leftist causes,” which is the go-to refrain when anything happens in court that doesn’t align with Trump’s desired outcome. To prove its point, Blanche points at the discipline imposed on Kevin Clinesmith.

To back up that claim, the lawsuit points to how the D.C. Bar handled the case of Kevin E. Clinesmith, a former F.B.I. lawyer who pleaded guilty to making a false statement when he altered an email to try to justify court-ordered surveillance of a former 2016 Trump campaign adviser. After his plea, Mr. Clinesmith had his bar license suspended for a year.

The suit called Mr. Clinesmith’s punishment a “slap on the wrist” for suborning unlawful surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and compared it to the effort to disbar Mr. Clark for “attempting to tell a lie” about the 2020 election.

To the extent that this argument is anything more than the logical fallacy of tu quoque, it’s got a point about Clinesmith, whose punishment should have been far more severe, likely disbarment, for having lied to the court. But the best that can be made of the argument is that it’s a point in mitigation of punishment, not to divest the bar of jurisdiction over Trump lawyers. And even in mitigation, if the overly lenient discipline imposed on Clinesmith was wrong, and it was, then more severe punishment is warranted here as should have been the case then.

But that’s not all Blanche has up his sleeve.

The lawsuit also invokes the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision granting partial immunity to presidents, suggesting that if a president has immunity, lawyers working for him in the government are also protected from ethical discipline.

“The president’s constitutionally required immunity would provide little protection if executive branch attorneys could be targeted for internal executive branch deliberations,” the lawsuit argued.

This argument can be read two ways. One is that the president’s immunity extends to his lawyers, which would suggest that anyone advising the president is somehow immune by virtue of proximity to Trump. The other is that because Trump can engage in illegal acts with immunity, he is entitled to have lawyers to advise him how to commit crimes. After all, Trump’s ignorance of the law means he needs legal assistance to make sure that he engages in unlawful conduct properly.

But if Blanches argument prevails, it means that one of the fundamental aspects of being a lawyer, adhering to the minimal ethical requirements of the profession upon pain of discipline, no longer applies to Trump administration lawyers. If so, are they even lawyers anymore?