Connecticut Judge: Attorney Marc Randazza Is Too Unethical To Represent Alex Jones

Marc Randazza, lawyer to the trolls, is very, very unethical.

The lawyer-to-the-trolls got booted from a Sandy Hook defamation case against the Infowars host.

(Carrera has pleaded not guilty.)Randazza’s brush-off in Connecticut, however, had nothing to do with the sordid company he keeps. It had to do with his ethical problems.In December, HuffPost publishedan exposéof Randazza’s violations of the rules of professional conduct that govern attorney behavior. He’d made scores of misrepresentations in court, entered into conflicts of interest and solicited bribes.

“There needs to be a little gravy for me,” he once wrote opposing counsel while seeking extra lucre. “I’m gonna want at least used BMW money.”An email from far-right attorney Marc Randazza seeking a payoff from a porn company. View the full documenthere

For years, Randazza had avoided scrutiny for his wrongdoing, mainly because the legal profession does such a poor job policing its own. Eventually, the State Bar of Nevada, which licenses Randazza, launched an investigation. (He is also licensed in Arizona, California, Florida and Massachusetts.) Randazza pleaded guilty to two ethical violations. The first concerned a shady loan he’d made; the second, a bribe he’d solicited from Oron, a file-sharing company he sued while working for Excelsior/Liberty. headtopics.com

But the Nevada Bar found “mitigating circumstances” to reduce Randazza’s punishment. In October, he walked away with a 12-month stayed suspension and an 18-month probation. He kept right on lawyering.He also continued to fudge facts. And his offenses may finally be catching up to him.

Legacy of LiesRandazza started his job at Excelsior/Liberty in 2009. But he was soon secretly lawyering for Excelsior/Liberty competitors such as Bang Bros, Titan Media and Kink.com. These were glaring conflicts of interest. Randazza also worked for companies accused of infringing Excelsior/Liberty’s copyrights. One was XVideos, a porn site that Excelsior/Liberty wanted Randazza, then their in-house counsel, to sue for infringement. Instead, Randazza started billing XVideos every month, a fact he concealed from Excelsior/Liberty while dissuading his employer from pursuing litigation. Randazza invoiced XVideos for over $44,000 during this period.

Randazza also made misrepresentations about his role at Excelsior/Liberty. In court filings, he often concealed his salaried job and claimed that Excelsior/Liberty had “incurred” his fees, which allowed him to recoup more money from litigation targets.

Over time, his behavior grew more brazen. He used ill-gotten privileged legal communications that might have come from a hacker to gain an advantage in one proceeding. In others, he began soliciting payoffs from litigation targets to “conflict himself out” from being able to sue them again. headtopics.com

In 2012, his boss at Excelsior/Liberty caught Randazza trying to sneak one of these bribes into a settlement agreement. Their relationship ended. Randazza filed a trumped-up discrimination claim, alleging he’d been sexually harassed as a straight man working at a gay porn company. He sued Excelsior/Liberty. Then he initiated an arbitration dispute. Excelsior/Liberty, meanwhile, filed bar complaints against Randazza everywhere he was licensed.

In 2013, Randazza lied to the bar associations in Nevada and Florida about not representing XVideos. The Nevada Bar, which was the lead regulatory body, did nothing and declined to investigate any of Excelsior/Liberty’s other allegations, citing pending litigation. The bar complaints in other jurisdictions were subsequently closed.

But the arbitration forced Randazza to produce financial records and admit under oath that he’d been working for XVideos all along, among other unethical things. In 2015, the arbitrator ruled against Randazza on numerous points and determined that the attorney had solicited a $75,000 bribe from Oron. Randazza filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying damages to Excelsior/Liberty. His former employer lodged another round of bar complaints based on the arbitrator’s decision and voluminous evidence from the arbitration.

At the end of 2016, the Nevada Bar finally filed an amended complaint against Randazza seeking to discipline him for misconduct. Randazza negotiated a conditional guilty plea that let him off the hook for most of the alleged violations. The Nevada Bar accepted his plea last year and recommended a light punishment, which the Nevada Supreme Court approved in October 2018. headtopics.com

The Nevada discipline has now prompted “reciprocal” disciplinary proceedings in the other jurisdictions that license Randazza. Those bar associations will decide whether to impose similar discipline for Randazza’s admitted ethical violations or to increase or reduce his punishment.

Below, a roundup of Randazza’s latest problems and prevarications across the country.HuffPostRandazza bones up on the law.ConnecticutRandazza is not licensed in Connecticut and not subject to reciprocal discipline here. He has, however, made misrepresentations that might indicate a continued pattern of unethical behavior.

Consider the sworn affidavit attached to Randazza’s pro hac vice application in the Sandy Hook case. In it, Randazza acknowledged the reciprocal disciplinary proceedings against him but told the court that he was “aware of no other grievances.”But he had known for weeks about a new Excelsior/Liberty-related complaint against him, this one filed in Arizona in October by a different party.

When HuffPost asked Randazza about the omission in his affidavit, he claimed the complaint wasn’t a “grievance” because Arizona uses different terms. He called it a “screening” and said he felt no need to report it since it was a refiling of documents from the Excelsior/Liberty dispute, which was true. A few days later, he told the Connecticut court that the new complaint dealt with the “same set of operative facts as the underlying discipline in Nevada.” That, though, was misleading. The complaint covers alleged violations that the Nevada Bar failed to address ― for example, Randazza’s request for “used BMW money.”

In response to Randazza’s application to represent Jones, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs had also filed a memorandum that included the 2015 arbitration ruling against Randazza. Emails produced during the arbitration show that Randazza solicited a payoff to prevent him from suing Oron in the future, a clear violation of an ethical rule that prohibits a lawyer from offering or making an agreement that restricts his right to practice.

In court, Randazza dismissed the memorandum as “an effort to smear” him and called the bribe a “mischaracterization.” Randazza also told the court that his discussions with Oron about paying him “were fully disclosed” to Excelsior/Liberty. But this, too, had been shot down during the arbitration.

“That’s a flat-out lie, and he knows it,” said Brian Dunlap, the vice president of Excelsior. “He could never produce any emails when he disclosed it. He could never recall any specific dates when he did. He could never back it up at all. And his story kept changing.”