It is undeniably true that no matter where in the United States an attorney practices, they owe a duty of loyalty and confidentiality to their clients. It is equally true that those duties persist long after the representation has concluded.

Yet ethical standards governing lawyers also provide that a lawyer for an organization — corporate, nonprofit or governmental — owes those duties to the organization itself, not any executive or employee.

That’s equally true of the federal government, former prosecutor and New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe told MS NOW.

“The entity that prosecutors represent — the government or the public — is not the same as the individual who is appointed or elected to run that entity,” she explained.

Roiphe, who has written about the ethical obligations of federal prosecutors, added, “The idea that there is an ethical conflict of interest if you were prosecuting the president is absurd. A lawyer for a corporation could easily cooperate with the government in prosecuting the CEO and no one would think those lawyers have a conflict of interest.”

And in a recent law review article with former federal prosecutor and Fordham Law School professor Bruce Green, who directs his school’s legal ethics program, Roiphe also observed that in representing the government itself, federal prosecutors have even more demanding obligations than in a standard attorney-client relationship.

As the Supreme Court noted in its 1935 opinion in Berger v. United States, “The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

Put another way, as Roiphe and Green wrote, for federal prosecutors, “the public is the principal, not the President.”....

After all, Blanche also said yesterday that among the thousands of DOJ investigations and prosecutions underway, “it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the President in the past has had issues with and that [he] believe[s] should be investigated. That is his right, and indeed, it is his duty to do that, meaning, to lead this country.”

The question now is this: If Trump is indeed the DOJ’s primary client, as Blanche suggested yesterday, can justice, as the Supreme Court conceived it, truly be done?