At least 60 lawyers from Missouri are supporting the idea of a Missouri state Supreme Court investigation into the actions of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), whose actions helped incite the recent deadly rioting at the U.S. Capitol building. Specifically, the attorneys’ complaint against Hawley is for the Missouri state Supreme Court’s Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, and retired attorney Alan Hoffman, who helped spread one of the letters calling for action against Hawley, proposed potential steps like disbarment. Although he said that the outcome is not his “determination to make,” Hoffman said that, in his perspective, the “accusations are serious enough to warrant disbarment.”
In an additional complaint for the same office, Springfield attorney Joe Miller said that Hawley “violated Missouri’s Rules of Professional Conduct by objecting to certified Electoral College votes and by making dishonest or misleading public statements, including statements questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.” Hawley, infamously, was the first U.S. Senator to announce that they’d be objecting to the Congressional certification of some of Biden’s electoral votes, which helped the objection plans gain significant stature. In order to sustain an objection to electoral votes and move the issue to debate, at least one Senator must support the effort.
No matter the antics from Hawley and the other Republicans, like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who eventually supported the effort to object to Biden’s electoral votes, there has never been any conclusive legitimacy whatsoever to the claims of systematic election fraud, which ex-President Donald Trump and some of his top allies claimed swung the election to Biden. Hawley said that he objected to the electoral votes in order to represent the interests of his constituents who had “deep concerns about election integrity” — but instead of a vitriolic and anti-democratic stunt, he could have shared helpful information with these constituents about the well-documented security of the election. Instead, he was apparently willing to consider throwing democracy itself to the side in the name of his political ambitions.
Hawley is far from the only individual who has faced serious pushback after the Trump team’s delusional election lies culminated in the recent Capitol rioting, where Trump supporters tried to forcibly disrupt the proceedings to certify the electoral college outcome. An organization of attorneys called Lawyers Defending American Democracy recently filed a complaint with the Grievance Committee of the New York State Bar, calling for a suspension of Giuliani’s ability to practice law and an investigation of his conduct.
