by The formal ethics complaint filed with the DC Bar by Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea got some airtime today on Fox News.
William LaJeunesse of Fox discussed the complaint with Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation and Michael Frisch of Georgetown Law Center. Frisch was formerly senior assistant bar counsel to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. As might be expected, they differed in the seriousness of the ethics complaint and how it would be treated by the DC Bar.
Darling, who is a Senior Fellow for Government Studies at Heritage, thought the complaint was on solid ground. However, he didn’t expect them to take it up until next year.
“It is clearly a reasonable basis for a complaint against Eric Holder to say ‘you are in charge of the Justice Department, the Justice Department is refusing to produce documents that were subpoenaed by Congress and as a result you were held in contempt to Congress not once, but twice’,” he said.
Frisch, who is an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown, didn’t think the DC Bar would take the complaint seriously and would likely dismiss it.
“Because this particular complaint is written as if the attorney general had already been convicted of a crime, I think it will likely be rejected on its face,” said Michael Frisch, former member of the D.C. Bar Counsel and current Georgetown Law School professor.
Frisch goes on to add that the DC Bar has the option of deferring any action until such time as a parallel proceeding such as a civil proceeding is completed.
Mike and David fired a shot across the bow and it was a brilliant strategic move. Whether it is squashed or not by the DC Bar is actually irrelevant because it has kept the issue of Holder and contempt alive in the mainstream media.