Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sunshine with high of 70. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:23 PM for 12h 59m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 476, Romulus Augustulus is deposed when Odoacer proclaims himself “King of Italy,” thus ending the Western Roman Empire.
Leah Treidler reports 2 Wisconsin lawyers are under fire for efforts to overturn the 2020 election (‘The nonprofit 65 Project filed ethics complaints against 15 lawyers, including 2 in Wisconsin’):
The 65 Project filed ethics complaints against 15 lawyers Wednesday, including Michael D. Dean of Brookfield and Daniel J. Eastman of Mequon, who were involved in a series of lawsuits on behalf of former President Donald Trump.
Neither Dean nor Eastman responded to a request for comment. All 15 lawyers were involved in litigation in Wisconsin.
The 65 Project is named for the 65 lawsuits filed by Trump-allied lawyers in swing states immediately after the 2020 election that seek to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
The group states that it aims to hold lawyers accountable for “fraudulent legal actions aimed at overturning legitimate elections.”
Since March, the project has filed about 40 ethics complaints against attorneys across the country.
The complaints are meant to deter lawyers nationwide from filing baseless lawsuits by exposing some lawyers, said Michael Teter, the group’s managing director.
“We want to do that by holding them accountable for their efforts and by publicizing their work so that they are known within their communities as having sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election through abusing the court system,” he said.
Because the results in Wisconsin were close, and because the state Legislature is dominated by Republicans, Teter said lawyers throughout the country targeted Wisconsin. They aimed “to convince the Republican legislature to then disregard the people’s will and to change the outcome of the electoral vote.”
But these lawsuits, he said, were mainly a political tool. Most lawyers didn’t expect to win, he said, and many dismissed their own cases within a week of filing. Despite that, he said they chipped away at public trust in the election results.
….
In the complaints against both Wisconsin lawyers, Eastman and Dean, the 65 Project cited their work on Feehan v. Wisconsin Elections Commission.
That case, the ethics complaint read, “lacked any basis in law or fact” and was “nearly a carbon copy of litigation filed in other cases.”
Wisconsin’s Office of Lawyer Regulation isn’t known for scrupulous enforcement, so these two will probably carry on as before.
Dean was graduated from Marquette Law in ’87, and Eastman from the University of New Hampshire School of Law in ’87. They’ve represented their schools poorly.
Each man is an embarrassment to his alma mater and to the profession.
Dog & Two Hikers Rescued from Arizona Canyon: