Lawyer scrambling to avoid suspension
Alex Jones, Proud Boy counsel Norm Pattis facing punishment for medical records release
Alex Jones lawyer Norm Pattis, whose law license was summarily suspended last week for sharing confidential medical files with other lawyers, was working Monday to win a delay that would allow him remain involved in a Capitol insurrection case in Washington
while taking an immediate appeal in Connecticut if he cannot get imposition of the suspension postponed there.
And in a filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, Pattis fired back at Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis, who ordered the suspension, attributing it to a pattern of alleged personal bias and abuse of discretion directed at both him and Jones. Pattis was in Washington where, until last week, he was part of the legal team defending alleged far-right, U.S. Capitol insurrectionist and Proud Boy member Joseph Biggs.
“The trial court had demonstrable bias against him and abused its discretion in taking jurisdiction over this matter,” Pattis and a colleague wrote of Bellis in an effort to persuade a Washington judge to permit him to remain part of the Proud Boys defense team. Elsewhere in the filing, they wrote, “Observers of the trial have reported an impression that the judge showed palpable animosity toward him.”
Bellis presided over the contentious Sandy Hook defamation suit that ended last year in a $1.4 billion verdict against Jones. In ordering Pattis’ suspension late last week, she said his failure to protect highly sensitive medical and psychiatric records belonging to relatives of Sandy Hook victims caused the
records to be “carelessly passed around from one unauthorized person to another” in violation of her repeated court orders.
The records at the center of the suspension, about 4,000 pages of medical and psychiatric records that were among about 390,000 pages of other records provided to Pattis’ office by relatives of Sandy Hook victims, were never disclosed publicly.
Pattis has acknowledged that he set in motion a series of exchanges that distributed the records between his law office in Connecticut and three others in Texas — all of which were involved in some fashion in lawsuits by Sandy Hook relatives against Jones. In his filing in Washington Monday, Pattis said none of the recipients of the records, contained on a computer hard drive, looked at them. He has said his violation of confidentiality orders was inadvertent.
The final recipient has said he destroyed the records.
Bellis wrote in a long order imposing the suspension, that Pattis’ sharing of the records with Texas lawyers was a willful violation of her orders that were issued to protect the Sandy Hook families forced to share the records with Jones from misuse of the material in an effort to discredit them. Had the record’s become public, Bellis said the families faced potentially “stunning” harm.
The suspension took effect late Thursday when Bellis issued her order and was immediately effective in the federal courts in Washington, which have a reciprocity agreement with Connecticut concerning lawyer discipline. Pattis spent part of Monday trying to convince the Washington court that is presiding over the seditious conspiracy trial of Biggs and four other Proud Boys to postpone the suspension.
No decision had been reached Monday afternoon. The sedition trial is set to begin this week.
In Connecticut, lawyers for Pattis had asked Bellis to postpone the suspension to allow him to appeal it. Should Bellis refuse, the six month suspension would likely have run before an appeal can be heard. Lawyers and judges following the case predicted Monday that neither Bellis, nor Judicial Branch disciplinary counsel Brian Staines, who Bellis appointed to press misconduct charges against Pattis, are likely to agree to a postponement.
Should Bellis deny a postponement, Pattis said he may try to press an expedited appeal with the state Appellate Court.
Coincidentally, Pattis’ office and his former colleague John R. Williams formally filed a notice Monday afternoon of Jones’ intention to appeal the potentially record setting verdict against Jones last fall in the Connecticut defamation suits by relatives of Sandy Hook shooting victims.
In her suspension order, Bellis said Pattis’ disclosure of the records was “inexcusable,” that it was part of an “abject failure to safeguard the plaintiff’s sensitive records,” and that it caused the records to be “carelessly passed around from one unauthorized person to another” in violation of multiple court orders.
Pattis was just as critical of the judge in his court filing in Washington, implying the suspension was retribution for his criticism of her rulings and his attempt to disqualify her during the contentious, four-year long Jones litigation. He acknowledged that his defense of Jones was aggressive, “sometimes toeing he line between respect and contempt for the court.” Jones, he said, was “openly and admittedly in contempt of court.”
Referring to himself, Pattis said: “He had previously moved to disqualify the trial court for a pattern of abuse of discretion and an appearance of bias against his client, Alex Jones, who stood trial in Connecticut for comments he made about the shooting deaths of school children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The trial court denied that motion. He believes it was improper for the court to hear an issue involving him after he had challenged its competence and impartiality in a public pleading.”
Elsewhere, Pattis questioned whether Bellis could be impartial toward him when he criticized her understanding of the first amendment after she imposed sanctions on Jones for incendiary comments on his Infowars broadcast about a lawyer for relatives of the Sandy Hook victims.
Pattis also wrote that Bellis had pressed for possible discipline against him even earlier in the Jones trial for his alleged failure to properly supervise the use of a power of attorney in the signing of an affidavit. Pattis said he reported himself to a disciplinary committee and was ultimately exonerated.
“Prior to his exoneration by an independent panel on the judge’s earlier referral involving the aforesaid affidavit, the judge called him to the bench for a private discussion in which it expressed its disappointment in him, telling him that she had previously highly regarded him,” the filing said. “This comment suggests that the court had prejudged a decision involving him before he had even had a chance to address the allegations in an evidentiary hearing.”