COLUMBIA, SC (AP) — Attorney lin wood, who filed legal challenges to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, is giving up his law license and opting to retire from the practice rather than face possible disbarment. Multiple states have considered disciplining him for pushing Trump’s false claims who defeated Democrat Joe Biden.
On Tuesday, Wood asked officials in his home state of Georgia to “withdraw” his law license in light of the “pending disciplinary proceedings against me.” In the request, made in a letter and posted on his Telegram account, Wood acknowledges that he is “barred from practicing law in this state and in any other state or jurisdiction and that I may not reapply for admission.”
Wood, an attorney licensed in Georgia since 1977, did not immediately respond to an email Wednesday seeking comment on the letter. A listing on the State Bar of Georgia website that he accessed Wednesday showed him as retired with no disciplinary offenses on his record.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump praised Wood for doing a “good job” filing legal challenges seeking to overturn his defeat, though the Trump campaign sometimes distanced itself from him. Courts across the country have rejected dozens of lawsuits making such allegations.
Georgia officials had been considering disbarring Wood for his efforts and held a disciplinary trial earlier this year. Wood sued the state bar association in 2022, alleging that the bar association’s request that he undergo a mental health evaluation as part of its investigation violated his constitutional rights, but a federal appeals court threw out that ruling, saying that Wood did not show that there was “bad faith” behind it. application.
In 2021, the Georgia secretary of state’s office opened an investigation into where Wood had been living when he voted early in person in the 2020 general election, sparked by Wood’s announcement on Telegram that he had moved to South Carolina. . Officials ruled that Wood did not violate Georgia election laws.
Wood, who bought three former plantations for a total of more than $16 million, moved to South Carolina several years ago and ran unsuccessfully for chairman of the Republican Party of that state in 2021.
In May, a Michigan watchdog group in filed a complaint against Wood and eight other Trump-aligned attorneys alleging they had engaged in misconduct and should be disciplined for filing a lawsuit challenging President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in that state. A court previously determined that the lawyers’ lawsuit had abused the judicial system.
Wood, whose name was on the 2020 Michigan lawsuit, has insisted that the only role he played was to tell attorney Sidney Powell that he was available if he needed an experienced litigator. Powell defended the lawsuit, saying lawyers sometimes have to raise what he called “unpopular issues.”
Other lawyers affiliated with efforts to keep Trump in power after his defeat in the 2020 election have faced similar challenges. Lawyer John Eastman, the architect of that strategy, faces 11 disciplinary charges in California State Bar Court in the wake of his development of a dubious legal strategy aimed at getting then-Vice President Mike Pence to interfere with Biden’s certification of victory.
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