D.C. Bar’s Violations Related to Rule 8.3

The D.C Bar has literally never enforced the Court’s Honor Code (Rule 8.3.a), which with limited exceptions requires attorneys to report lies and similar misconduct by other attorneys.

Examples of ODC ignoring Rule 8.3.a include:

• DOJ’s decades of notorious violations: The ABA (in 2010) and others (in 2014) have publicly called DOJ out for its under-reporting.  Of 400 reckless or intentional violations that DOJ itself found its attorneys to have committed, DOJ identified less than 5% as having been reported to the D.C. Bar. This despite that the 400 were the most egregious of a larger pool of 650 violations, and that — since Congress’ passage of the 1999 McDade Act — it has been statutorily mandated that all DOJ attorneys who work in D.C. comply with D.C.’s Rules, including their reporting mandates.

• NDA-protected violations: D.C.’s Bar Counsel has similarly ignored dozens of Rule 8.3 and other violations by DOJ, private and even Bar attorneys in just one still-concealed matter that has already caused over $150M in harm to thousands of others, including the attorneys’ clients. The underlying violations include fraud, directions to destroy evidence revealing the fraud, and threats to sue if the fraud and other violations are reported. The violations are dispositively shown in a Dec. 23, 2015 report to the Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility. Despite receiving 2016, 2017 and 2018 updates documenting continued and increased harm from the violations, the Board (while not denying the violations) has done nothing. Further disclosure of the underlying violations is arguably constrained by an almost certainly unethical NDA about which the Board has been asked since 2015 and the Bar’s Legal Ethics Committee has been asked since 2017 and 2020.

Misrepresentation by Bar Counsel re. 8.3 Non-Enforcement: D.C.’s Bar Counsel (also known as Disciplinary Counsel) affirmatively misrepresented the reason for the Bar’s non-enforcement of Rule 8.3. During a January 22, 2018 webinar on ethics, when asked about the lack of such enforcement, D.C.’s Bar Counsel responded, “The problem is, you don’t know what you don’t know.” But, as reflected above, that is plainly not the problem, and the response violates Rule 8.4 as “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.” A major (if not the major) part of the problem is that Bar Counsel knows of but has consistently ignored hundreds of Rule 8.3 and other violations by those whom his office notoriously favors.