How Morning Joe Is Helping To Turn Clinton’s Legal Work Into A Political Liability
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 8th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
How Morning Joe Is Helping To Turn Clinton’s Legal Work Into A Political Liability
Joe Scarborough and Ezra Klein are helping to normalize guilt-by-association smears targeting defense attorneys based on their clients, arguing that Hillary Clinton’s work defending an alleged child rapist in 1975 is becoming a political liability.
The American Bar Association has condemned this type of attack as “disturbing.”
Clinton’s work on the case, known publicly and reported on for years, re-emerged after the Washington Free Beacon violated library policy and published an interview Clinton gave in the mid-1980s discussing her legal representation of the alleged rapist.
Clinton defended her work on the case in an interview with Mumsnet that was published July 4, explaining once again that she was assigned to the case, that she asked to be relieved from the assignment, and that she “had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability.”
Reporting on the warmed-over scrutiny of the case on Tuesday, Vox claimed that “a criminal defense case from Hillary Clinton’s past as a lawyer is becoming a political liability.” The headline ominously stated: “Hillary Clinton’s legal career is coming back to haunt her.”
Klein, the co-founder of Vox, appeared on Morning Joe to expand on the idea that Clinton’s legal work was a political liability. “I think it’s hard for folks to understand why you would go to the mat for a client who had done something terrible who you knew is guilty,” Klein said. “And what she’s saying there is that that was her obligation as a lawyer and that the prosecution had done a horrible job.”
While Scarborough at one point agreed that attorneys “usually take that court appointment and do their best to defend their client,” he subsequently tried to parse the distinction between a public defender and Clinton’s role as a court-appointed attorney from a legal aid clinic:
SCARBOROUGH: [I]sn’t there a distinction, though, between when you are hired by a public defender’s office, and the purpose of the public defender’s office is actually to give people the representation that they are guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America? And then you have Hillary Clinton’s case, where she was running a legal clinic. She may have been court-appointed, but obviously she had a lot more discretion on whether she was going to take a child rapist or not on as a client than if you are a public defender, where you are working as a public defender, you have no choice.
Legal and child welfare experts told Newsday that Clinton’s work in the case was appropriate in 2008, the last time her work in the case came under media scrutiny. Clinton wrote about the case in her 2003 autobiography, Living History. Jonathan Adler, a libertarian law professor, has urged Clinton’s critics not to attack her representation in this case, specifically warning that it could be chilling to send a message to young attorneys that representing unpopular clients could become a “political liability.”
Adler is not alone. Republicans Ken Starr, Lindsey Graham, and Michael Mukasey have all cautioned against using an attorney’s clients as a cudgel.
