Alan Feuer has an interesting report in The New York Times.
John Pierce has been a combative advocate for those accused of participating in the Jan. 6 attack, but he’s missed court appearances for a week.
(Colorado Blue has already tackled this, but I thought I’d take a swing at it too.)
The mysterious disappearance of the lawyer John Pierce began last Tuesday, prosecutors say, when he missed a hearing for one of the many cases where he is representing a defendant in the Capitol riot investigation. The young associate who took his place said that Mr. Pierce had a “conflict.” At the time, no one seemed to give it much mind.
But in the days that followed, Mr. Pierce — who is defending more cases connected to the riot than any other lawyer — missed additional hearings and the reasons for his absence started changing.
Where is he? There are conflicting stories: he’s on a ventilator with Covid. He’s been hospitalized for exhaustion. He’s been in a car accident. What is known is this:
Finally, on Monday — after Mr. Pierce had still failed to emerge — the government got involved. Federal prosecutors issued letters to several judges in 17 Capitol riot cases, informing them that no one in the Justice Department had heard from Mr. Pierce in a week and that “multiple” phone numbers for his law firm appeared to have been disconnected.
Pierce had been making big promises on behalf of his clients:
...His clients — among them members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia — have stood out not only for their number, but also for the scorched-earth battle that he has vowed to wage on their behalf.
A self-described pro-Trump populist, Mr. Pierce has promised, for example, to force the government to give him video footage of the Capitol for several days before and after Jan. 6, and has said he will demand information about every police officer working at the building that day. He has also vowed to subpoena hostile witnesses like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ostensibly to learn what she may have known about security at the Capitol before the attack.
With Pierce possibly turning to ghosting as a legal tactic, his clients are now in a peculiar legal limbo. What makes it even more bizarre is the associate attempting to handle matters in Pierce’s absence has some… issues.
...prosecutors did express concern in their letters filed on Monday about the young associate, Ryan Joseph Marshall, who has been standing in for Mr. Pierce at the hearings he has missed.
For one thing, Mr. Marshall is not a licensed lawyer, prosecutors said, and has taken actions on behalf of clients “that he is not permitted” to take. Moreover, they went on, it remains unclear if and when Mr. Marshall will be able to get his law license given that he is under indictment in two criminal cases accusing him of corruption, theft and fraud in Pennsylvania.
Pierce has made a specialty of defending right wing clients — although one wonders why they would go to him based on his performance to date. He was representing Kyle Rittenhouse for a time, but was fired over financial matters and questionable actions.
He was working with Lin Wood — who has been involved with Trump’s efforts to get the 2020 election overturned; Wood has problems of his own, according to Alison Durkee at Forbes.
...The state bar is investigating whether Wood violated multiple professional conduct rules after the election, as he brought multiple lawsuits challenging the presidential election results and spread baseless conspiracy theories online involving such figures as former Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.
The bar asked Wood to undergo a mental health evaluation as part of that investigation, as the organization’s rules state “mental illness, cognitive impairment, alcohol abuse, or substance abuse, to the extent of impairing competency as a lawyer” are grounds for being disbarred.
Other clients have fired Pierce as well, for bad practices and poor service. He has conflict of interests between several of the many clients he is supposed to be representing.
Given all of that, why would he have any clients at all? It appears that his claims of government conspiracies, enthusiasm for Donald Trump, and social media self-promotion have made him a go-to guy for people who believe in the Deep State, QAnon, etc. He’s also an outspoken anti-vaxxer, lending some credibility to the claim he’s been hospitalized and is on a ventilator.
Inae Oh and Dan Friedman at Mother Jones are also covering his disappearance, noting:
Pierce’s legal work, which includes his firm representing everyone from Kyle Rittenhouse to Rudy Giuliani, has at times been overshadowed by personal drama. As our colleague Samantha Michaels has written in-depth, Pierce was previously sued by a former colleague for wrongful termination, while at the same time he fought a messy custody battle in which he was accused of threatening his ex-wife while claiming that God was working in his favor...
Bruce Vielmetti at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had this observation:
Don Lewis, a former law partner who is suing Pierce, chronicles Pierce's career at Sunlight-Reports.com. "As I stated over two years ago in a Complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court, ‘the opening of PB’s books would very likely reveal that Pierce is a fraud and a con man, lying to his partners, lying to the press, lying to his clients and lying to investors," Lewis said about Pierce's latest legal drama. "Sadly, buoyed by inaction and delays of the judicial system, as well as others tasked with protecting the public, Pierce has left an ever-increasing wake of destruction in his path," Lewis said.
Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. His campaign and four years of incompetency/corruption/lies appear to have opened a portal to a rich vein of greed, graft, and outright crazy. The profiteers swimming in his wake are more of “only the best people” still afflicting us.
It seems appropriate to turn to the late Hunter S. Thompson for a statement about this ongoing mystery: “When The Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro”.