(3 of 3) Alex Jones’ Lawyer Violated Legal Ethics By Soliciting Porn Bribes. Just How Dirty Is Marc Randazza?
Source: Huffpost
Throne Of Lies
The rise of Trump has brought a common arc of radicalization on the political right into sharper relief ― that of the contrarian troll who gets lost in his provocations and mutates into something dangerous. Just as some snarky libertarians turned into neo-Nazis and Tucker Carlson was a conservative snot before morphing into a megaphone for white nationalist talking points, Randazza, too, appears to have transformed on his trollish journey through the legal system.
And like Carlson, who gets to spout hate on Fox News because he’s a millionaire who once wore a bowtie on CNN, Randazza benefits from the trappings of privilege. His Georgetown law degree and admission to five state bars offer him what people targeted by his clients rarely receive: the benefit of the doubt. Consider a recent front-page Wall Street Journal story that focused on Gab and quoted Randazza as a First Amendment expert. Incredibly, the story failed to mention that unethical attorney Randazza has served as Gab’s attorney. Consider, too, that Fox News, CNN, Vice News and others have credulously given Randazza a platform to polish his brand.
But his own profession has shown the least skepticism. Less than a week after the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the journal of the American Bar Association ran a short column by Randazza lamenting how easy it is for “vindictive lying women” to ruin the lives of innocent men. Randazza neglected to tell his ABA editors he’d already run the column on a right-wing legal blog. He also failed to offer any proof for his claim in the column that he currently represents (“at a deep discount”) multiple women who have survived sexual assault.
He did, however, have a message for sexual assault victims.
“I believe in their right to tell their story without being sued for it,” he wrote.
Last year, corrupt attorney Randazza was suing a woman for telling her story about being raped.
Randazza gets away with those sorts of moves because many people assume basic honesty from lawyers. The legal system does too.
“It would take too much time and energy to second-guess and check up on everybody all the time,” said Bernie Burk, a legal ethics expert and former professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. “Generally speaking, if you’re reasonably clever and selective about your dishonesty, you can get away with a great deal before the system catches you.”
Randazza’s duplicity, whether clever or selective, has been constant. Even in recent cases that do not involve porn or Nazis, he has made a mockery of the truth. In Utah federal court, he was — until a few weeks ago — defending a man named Ryan Monahan who ran a website called Honest Mattress Reviews and had been sued by Purple, a mattress manufacturer, after Monahan allegedly lied on his site about Purple’s products being covered with a cancer-causing white powder. Purple declared that Monahan had a business relationship with one of its main competitors, GhostBed.
In court, Randazza adamantly argued that Monahan was “an independent journalist” entitled to full protection under the First Amendment. He dismissed the GhostBed connection as a “conspiracy” that “even Alexander Dumas could not have imagined when he wrote the Count of Monte Cristo.”
The conspiracy turned out to be real. A witness came forward with evidence proving that Monahan “effectively acted as [GhostBed’s] head of marketing” and was being paid $10,000 a month by GhostBed. Corrupt Randazza and Monahan had misled both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit and, repeatedly, the Utah federal court.
“Interference with the judicial process here was substantial,” U.S. District Judge Dee Benson wrote, adding that Monahan’s violations were “sufficiently egregious that perjury prosecutions would, and perhaps should be, an appropriate consideration.”
In February, Benson ordered sanctions be imposed on Monahan and his business, Honest Reviews LLC. A few weeks later, Monahan sold his website to Brooklyn Bedding, another mattress company, and had it wire the money directly to Randazza to pay Monahan’s “legal debt.” In July, Benson awarded Purple approximately $92,000 in sanctions from Monahan. When Purple’s lawyers contacted Randazza to collect, he told them Monahan didn’t have the money. Randazza drained his client dry.
“So do what you gotta do,” he told Purple’s lawyers.
A desperate Monahan sent a letter to the judge saying he wanted to settle with Purple. Randazza then filed a motion to withdraw from the case “as a matter of professional ethics,” leaving Monahan to scramble to find replacement counsel.
“Everything that has exploded in this thing has been because of what [Randazza] has done,” Monahan told HuffPost.
Yet Monahan, who said he has a limited grasp of the law, is the one on the hook for sanctions. He is the only one whom the judge suggested should face perjury charges, despite the judge’s ruling about Randazza's “vigorously asserted” misrepresentations in court.
“You know what I like about my life?” Randazza once told a legal blog. “There’s not a motherfucker in this world who ever says, ‘I’m ambivalent about Marc Randazza.’ That is what scares me … people being ambivalent about me.”
Lowering The Bar
Unethical attorney Randazza had escaped sanctions in Utah. But in Nevada, his long disciplinary proceeding was nearing its end. It had been half a decade since Liberty alerted the Nevada Bar to Randazza’s misbehavior. The porn company had given the bar thousands of pages of evidence about its former in-house counsel’s conflicts of interest and solicitation of bribes, his use of privileged and confidential material, and his misrepresentations about fees.
The bar treats multiple offenses and a “pattern of misconduct” as aggravating circumstances that can justify harsher discipline, so Dunlap, the Excelsior vice president who wrote the company’s bar complaints, made a deliberate point of including that phrase. “We felt that would be the kicker, that once they had seen that that pattern had been demonstrated that it would leave no room for being wishy-washy or letting him off easy,” Dunlap said.
Randazza, in an effort to hang on to his law license, conceded as little as possible. He submitted a conditional guilty plea to the bar confessing to two of the nine ethical violations the bar alleged that he’d committed. The first forbids certain conflicts of interest and concerned a shady loan Randazza made Liberty; the second prohibits a lawyer from restricting his right to practice and was related to the Oron bribe.
In exchange for this plea, Randazza asked the bar for a stayed suspension and probation — a slap on the wrist. But the bar was under no obligation to give it to him. The baseline sanction for the violations Randazza admitted is suspension.
On Oct. 10, the order came down in Nevada Supreme Court.
“We hereby suspend Marc J. Randazza for 12 months, stayed for 18 months,” it read.
That was Randazza’s punishment: a stayed suspension and probation, plus a small fine and 20 hours of education in legal ethics. He will avoid actual suspension if he “stays out of trouble” during his probation, according to the order.
The system had finally caught him. And the system didn’t seem to much care. The bar didn’t pursue Randazza’s solicitation of other bribes or his other conflicts of interest. Nor did it investigate whether Randazza despoiled evidence, lied to courts in fee motions or used privileged information that might have been obtained illegally.
What the bar did find were “mitigating circumstances” to allow for lighter punishment. Randazza, for instance, had no prior discipline in Nevada. Another factor was the “time delay” between his ethical violations and the disciplinary hearing — a delay the bar helped cause by dismissing Liberty’s initial complaint.
“We had … to essentially lay out everything for the Nevada Bar and then once we handed it to them on a silver platter, they weren’t willing to go the distance,” Dunlap said.
Here was Randazza’s privileged white-collar tribe, policing itself, barely, behind closed doors. The bar refused multiple requests to discuss the Randazza matter or its own arcane rules. For two months, the bar also rebuffed HuffPost’s attempts to view records of Randazza’s disciplinary proceeding, despite their high public-interest value. At one point, a lawyer for the bar insisted the records were confidential and could only be obtained through a subpoena or a court order — a stance that clashed with that of the Nevada Supreme Court. When asked for the bar’s policy on sealing disciplinary records, the lawyer insisted it was an “internal” and unpublished policy. The next day, he said the bar was “implementing a new policy” and handed over the records.
Among them is a transcript of the June hearing when the bar accepted Randazza’s guilty plea. During the hearing, Matthew Carlyon, another bar lawyer, applauded Randazza for reforming his conduct and cited as evidence of the metamorphosis several phone calls Randazza had placed to the bar’s ethics hotline seeking advice.
“He is showing that he’s willing to change and not be out there endangering the public,” Carlyon said. “That’s important because … ultimately our job here is to provide protection to the public. We’re not here to discipline attorneys. That’s not why we exist. We want to protect the public.”
Since then, Randazza has stayed true to form. In Montana federal court, he disobeyed rules requiring him to keep the court informed about his disciplinary proceedings. The judge, clearly upset, ordered Randazza in November to update the court. When Randazza did, he mentioned his stayed suspension but said nothing about his probation, despite describing it in detail to several other federal courts.
Randazza may soon face “reciprocal discipline” in other states where he is licensed. Following his discipline in Nevada, the bars in Arizona, California and Florida have opened or will open their own reviews of his ethical violations. But other bars tend to follow the example of the lead organization, and it is unclear if these states will probe more deeply.
In a disciplinary proceeding against Randazza in Massachusetts federal court, he has shown no remorse for his sleazy behavior and has already distorted reality in an attempt to avoid a suspension. In one filing, he blamed Oron for his solicitation of a bribe. He also audaciously told the court he didn’t “cause his clients to suffer any actual harm or financial losses.”
“At every step of the way, that has proven to be untrue,” Dunlap countered.
Randazza pilfered the $60,000 Righthaven settlement from Liberty, according to the arbitrator’s ruling. He caused Liberty to possibly miss out on another settlement by not pursuing XVideos, one of his secret clients, for copyright infringement. Randazza also violated the terms of the $550,000 settlement he’d negotiated with Oron — most significantly by helping his friend file a copycat suit — causing Liberty to pay back $275,000 of the award.
This week, however, the Massachusetts court let Randazza off the hook. The court declined to put the rogue attorney on probation and deferred a decision about further reciprocal discipline until his Nevada probation ends in April 2020. At that point, it’s unclear what further discipline the court could even impose, especially if corrupt Randazza stays out of new trouble. And, so, the lawyer of choice for far-right extremists will continue to lawyer, at least for now ― an example not so much of what America prohibits these days but rather what it permits, provided you belong to the right caste.
When reached by email, Randazza refused to comment for this story. He referred HuffPost to his attorney, who also did not comment. Randazza’s attorney, it turned out, was his expert witness from the Liberty arbitration — the one forced under oath to essentially acknowledge Randazza’s dishonesty. Last year, the same attorney submitted an affidavit supporting a Randazza fee motion and, on an attached resume, listed his expert witness experience. The records of the Liberty arbitration were by then public, but the man referred to the matter only as Confidential v. Confidential. His online biography revealed more: Randazza’s attorney is a former chair and current member of the ethics committee of the Nevada Bar.
Somewhere in Gloucester, looking out at his hometown and dreaming of zealotry, the troll began to laugh.
Top illustration: Owen Freeman.
A few of the documents referenced in this story:
1.) Nevada Supreme Court order approving Randazza’s conditional guilty plea: https://www.scribd.com/document/396164843/18-39837
2.) Nevada Bar amended complaint against Randazza: https://www.scribd.com/document/396164997/Bar-Amended-Complaint
3.) Emails between Randazza and TNA counsel: https://www.scribd.com/document/396166781/Randazza-TNA-Bribe
4.) Emails between Randazza and Oron counsel: https://www.scribd.com/document/396166992/Randazza-Oron-Bribe
5.) Emails between Randazza and James Grady about Oron: https://www.scribd.com/document/396166226/144-10-Grady
6.) Example of Randazza’s fee misrepresentations: https://www.scribd.com/document/396167552/Fee-misrepresentations
7.) Randazza’s sham discrimination claim that was dismissed: https://www.scribd.com/document/396166288/NERC-Claim
8.) Arbitration ruling against Randazza: https://www.scribd.com/document/396166322/Interim-Arbitration-Award
9.) Randazza’s disclosure of liabilities and assets in Chapter 11 bankruptcy: https://www.scribd.com/document/396282036/15
10.) Complaint about Randazza to The Florida Bar: https://www.scribd.com/document/396166039/149-2
11.) Arbitrator’s opposition to vacating arbitration award: https://www.scribd.com/document/396167710/Arbitrator-Vacatur-Brief
12.) Randazza’s military records: https://www.scribd.com/document/396174634/Randazza-Military-Records
13.) Randazza’s letter to Jane Gari on behalf of Roosh Valizadeh: https://www.scribd.com/document/396165595/10-5
14.) Utah federal court order addressing Randazza’s dishonesty: https://www.scribd.com/document/396165707/292-pdf
15.) Randazza’s response in Massachusetts disciplinary action: https://www.scribd.com/document/396167771/8
16.) Massachusetts court order deferring reciprocal discipline: https://www.scribd.com/document/396167819/10