As a young man, I practiced civil law in Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage was a city of 200,000 when I lived there, and the town supported about a thousand lawyers--one lawyer for every 200 residents.
Indeed, the Anchorage bar was small enough that I knew most of the attorneys and their reputations for honesty, probity, and fair dealing. In those days, most Alaska lawyers were honorable, and I often settled commercial disputes with a phone call or a handshake.
However, I occasionally got burned by a shady legal practitioner through some sort of dirty trick. These betrayals of ethical norms always stung me deeply, but my law partners always reassured me with this oft-repeated observation: "What goes around comes around."
In other words, unethical lawyers nearly always get caught out. Eventually, most of the scoundrels who abused the legal system to bamboozle my clients came to grief--bankruptcy, disbarment, legal malpractice lawsuits, or an embarrassing public scandal of some kind.
Letitia James is about to learn the meaning of what goes around comes around. She campaigned for the office of New York Attorney General by promising to investigate Donald Trump, whom she described as an "illegitimate president." She kept that promise.
James's office cobbled together a sweeping fraud claim against Trump, accusing him of including false information on a loan application. She won an enormous judgment in an arguably biased New York courtroom.
Now, AG James has been indicted for making a fraudulent claim on a loan application--the very thing she accused Trump of.
Her supporters claim that James's indictment is an act of revenge on Trump's part, but I disagree. As James herself said, "No one is above the law."
In other words, what goes around comes around.
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| What goes around comes around. |
