A lawyer who takes a conservative client now has to price in a bar complaint, a press release, and an advertisement telling the next lawyer not to make the same mistake. That is the business. The outfit running it is called the 65 Project, named for the first sixty-five attorneys it meant to go after for challenging the 2020 election. The man who built it said the point out loud. File the grievance, yes. Then shame them and make them toxic in their communities and their firms. Threaten the livelihood. Kill the pool of legal talent on the right. The deterrent, he said, is the product.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Conservative lawyers have been under assault by groups like Project 65 which are well funded & organised. They seek to ensure no lawyer dares represent anyone they don’t want represented – it is the other wide of the lawfare strategy of installing woke/corrupt judges and District Attorneys. This is a coup designed to deny legal representation for political reasons. Do not let these bastards win. Speak up.
— Lara Logan (@laralogan) July 14, 2026
What they file, and what they say it is for
The project opened in 2022 under the advice of David Brock, the Clinton-world operative who founded the outfit that monitors the press for the other side. Its managing director, Michael Teter, started with ten names. Cleta Mitchell. Jenna Ellis. Boris Epshteyn. Joseph diGenova. The charge, in the papers, was that lawyers who represented the last Republican president in election fights had abused their licenses. The remedy they asked of the bars was discipline up to disbarment.
A tally of the wider campaign, from 2016 through this year, counts 181 bar complaints and related filings. They hit 122 lawyers, five firms, and 44 people who are not lawyers, across 34 jurisdictions in 26 states. Ninety-two of the filings were tied to the 2020 election. The 65 Project itself accounts for 84 of them. Documented money behind the effort comes to $16.4 million. The first test case, in 2017, was Kris Kobach. The current list includes the attorney general, his deputy, Jeanine Pirro, Emil Bove, Lindsey Halligan, and Pam Bondi. Nineteen complaints went in during 2025. Twenty-two have gone in so far this year. Dozens more are said to be scoped.
The stated theory is that a lawyer who files a weak election case has violated the rules of professional conduct. The stated aim is something else. Brock told reporters the grievances were the means. The end was to make the lawyer poisonous at home and unemployable at the firm. In 2024 the project bought ads in swing states, on television, radio, social media, and in bar journals, aimed at lawyers who might take the work. The line on the ad was plain. Don’t lose your license because of Trump.
When is someone going to step in and put a STOP to “65 Project” lawfare David Brock and his cronies?
https://t.co/3raQcGRDwX
— nmb7401 ULTRAMAGA #IstandwithIsrael (@nmb7401) October 2, 2026
What it has done to the practices
The bars have not given them everything they asked. A review of nearly eighty complaints filed in 2022 and 2023 found only three that ended in public discipline, and it was not clear the complaints caused them. Two followed criminal convictions. Fifteen Republican state attorneys general on the list remained in good standing. A loss at the bar, the operators have said, can be as useful as a win. The complaint is the punishment. The defense is the bill.
Where the bars did move, the damage is total. John Eastman has been disbarred. Defending the license has cost him $3 million. Rudolph Giuliani has been disbarred. In New York, 7,200 people were mobilized to pile onto the complaint against him. Kenneth Chesebro has been disbarred. Jenna Ellis drew a three-year suspension. A proceeding against Jeff Clark reached a recommendation of disbarment. Cleta Mitchell left her firm. That is the spectrum the next lawyer is shown: a letter in the file if he is lucky, the end of the practice if he is not, and a seven-figure defense either way.
Alan Dershowitz, who had a complaint filed against him, called it McCarthyism and said it is scaring lawyers away. That is the design working. A partner who wants the client has to explain to the other partners why the firm should carry a grievance, a news cycle, and an ad campaign with the firm’s name next to a license. Most firms do not make that explanation. The client then finds out that the lawyer who would have taken the case has a conflict he did not have last year. The conflict is the complaint.
What it does to the ones who have not been named
The ninety lawyers who were complained against and never disciplined still paid. A bar investigation is confidential until it is not, and the project does not wait for the confidential part. It announces the filing. Clients read the announcement. Referral sources read it. The malpractice carrier reads it. A solo practitioner in a county seat does not have a communications shop. He has a docket and a reputation, and the reputation is what the project said it would poison.
The ads are aimed at the lawyer who has not been named yet. A young associate watching Eastman’s bill, or a mid-career litigator watching Ellis’s suspension, does the arithmetic before he takes the call. Representation of a Republican candidate in a contested election, or of an official carrying out a policy the other side wants sanctioned, now comes with a published threat to the license. The project has said that is the point. A right that cannot find a lawyer is a right that exists on paper.
The campaign did not end when the original sixty-five were processed. It moved on to the lawyers now in the government, and to anyone the file says is next. A profession that lets one side pick the other side’s counsel, by complaint and by advertisement, has stopped being a profession. It has become a screening committee. The screening is the shame. The toxic part is the practice, and it is going as planned.
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