The idea of an independent DOJ also died today.

It feels very “fiddling while Rome burns” to write about the legal ethics implications of today’s Supreme Court ruling that has the potential to have ended core concepts of our Constitutional Republic just 3 days before what would have been its 248th birthday, but legal ethics issues are things that I am more than qualified to write about. So, I will focus only on how six Justices have today completely eradicated the notion that the Attorney General of the U.S. is not the President’s lawyer.

In short, if you are too depressed to read further today (or later), there seems to me no real way going forward to apply the ethical concepts of Model Rule 1.13 to the Attorney General of the United States. That rule, as a refresher, establishes the concept that a lawyer for an organization represents the organization and not its individual constituents.

Justice Roberts, writing for the Majority, accomplishes the deletion of RPC 1.13(a) with respect to attorneys in the Department of Justice over the course of about two pages:

“[I]nvestigation and prosecution of crimes is a quintessentially executive function.” And the Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including with respect to allegations of election crime. The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” And the Attorney General, as head of the Justice Department, acts as the President’s “chief law enforcement officer” who “provides vital assistance to [him] in the performance of [his] constitutional duty to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.’” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511, 520 (1985) (quoting Art. II, §1, cl. 8). Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1. For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority. As we have explained, the President’s power to remove “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed” may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts. The President’s “management of the Executive Branch” requires him to have “unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates”—such as the Attorney General—“in their most important duties.” The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. And the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority. Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.

(most internal citations and quotations omitted)

Thus, at least as to the Attorney General of the United States, it does not seem to be reasonable any longer to argue that such a lawyer represents the United States and not the President. Thus, something I’ve written in the past and been quite proud of, is no longer supportable under precedent of the United States Supreme Court.

And, again I realize that this is not the most catastrophic aspect of today’s turn of events. It has, of course, always been true that the President has the power to fire someone serving as Attorney General. But as the dissent noted, we’ve certainly now got a new twist that no longer has a clear answer:

While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death. Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority.

Good times.