There is a wall holding up the American courtroom. You cannot see it, you have never thought about it, and a well-funded campaign spent the last several years quietly trying to knock it down. This is the story of the first time they swung the hammer — and the man who showed them it could be done.
“Kill the pool of available legal talent going forward.”
Those are not my words. They belong to the people who built a campaign called the 65 Project — and the method they were describing was first proven to work by a single lawyer in a Detroit courtroom, more than a year before that campaign existed.
The other phrase they used was shorter. “Make them toxic.” That one belongs to David Brock — the operative who built Media Matters and American Bridge — describing what he wanted to happen to a particular kind of American lawyer. Make them radioactive inside their own firms. Make them poison in their own communities. Drain the supply of attorneys willing to take a certain kind of case until there is none left.
Sit with that first phrase, because it is the whole story compressed into eight words. Not win the argument. Not beat them in court. Kill the pool. Make sure that the next time a certain kind of client goes looking for a lawyer, there is no lawyer left who will pick up the phone.
To understand why that sentence should frighten you — and it should, no matter who you voted for — you have to understand the thing it was aimed at.
The American legal system is adversarial by design. That is not a flaw in it; it is the engine of it. Every side gets a champion. Each champion fights as hard as the rules allow, and a neutral judge or jury decides between them. The entire machine rests on one fragile precondition: that anyone — the guilty, the despised, the politically radioactive — can find a lawyer willing to stand up and fight for them, and that the lawyer can do so without fearing the destruction of their own career for having taken the case.
This is not a modern nicety. It is a founding principle, and we have a founding story to match.
In 1770, after British soldiers fired into a crowd of his own neighbors in what became known as the Boston Massacre, a young Boston lawyer agreed to defend them. He was reviled for it. He took the case anyway, because he believed the right to a defense was sacred even for the most hated men in the colony. He won acquittals for most of them. Years later he called it one of the finest services he ever rendered his country. His name was John Adams, and he went on to become the second President of the United States.
That is the wall. A lawyer must be free to take an unpopular client and make an unpopular argument without losing the right to practice at all.
Knock that wall down — make representation itself a punishable offense — and the courthouse stops being neutral ground. It becomes a place where only the approved side can find a defender. The unapproved side simply cannot lawyer up, because the lawyers have all been warned. That is not a justice system. It is a checkpoint.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, a campaign was built to do exactly that. Not metaphorically — with money, with staff, with a public masthead and a written mission. It was called the 65 Project, named for the roughly sixty-five lawsuits that Trump-aligned attorneys filed contesting the result across the swing states.
Its public mission sounded, on its face, almost reasonable. On its own website, the Project said it existed to hold accountable the lawyers who brought fraudulent claims to overturn legitimate elections. And taken at face value, who could object? Frivolous litigation is supposed to have consequences. Sanctions and bar discipline exist precisely so that lawyers cannot lie to a court without risk.
But read what they actually wrote they would do. The Project announced it would not merely use the rules that already existed — it would work toward “creating a rule-based system” to strengthen, in their words, the mechanisms of accountability and deterrence. Remember that last word. Deterrence. It will define everything that follows in this series, because it is the quiet confession of what this was always about.
And read what the principals said when they were not writing for the public. Make them toxic. Kill the pool. That is not accountability. Accountability is case-by-case; it asks whether this lawyer did this wrong thing. What Brock and his colleagues described is something else entirely — a category-wide purge, soft and procedural and paperwork-driven, but a purge all the same.
Let me be fair, because fairness is what makes this case unanswerable. Some of those post-2020 lawsuits were frivolous. Courts said so, repeatedly and across the political spectrum. And bar complaints are a legitimate tool — a necessary one. A lawyer who knowingly lies to a court should answer for it, and the disciplinary system exists precisely so that the profession can police its own. None of that is in dispute. That is exactly why what came next is the story: a legitimate tool, aimed not at proven misconduct case by case, but at an entire category of lawyers, at industrial scale, with the stated goal of draining the talent pool. The tool was real. The purpose was the corruption of it.
And here is the grimly ingenious part, the mechanism that makes the whole thing work: you do not have to win. You do not sue the lawyer. You file a complaint with their bar, you push out the press release, and the process itself becomes the punishment. The lawyer bleeds money on a defense. The lawyer wears the headline. The lawyer watches clients quietly drift away. Whether the complaint ever results in actual discipline is almost beside the point — and as this series will show you with the numbers, it usually did not. The filing was the weapon. The verdict was optional.
But before the 65 Project ever existed, someone had already proven the method worked. Call it the demonstration.
December 2020. Detroit. The case was King v. Whitmer — the “Kraken” suit, the one Sidney Powell and a team of attorneys filed to throw out Michigan’s result. The City of Detroit had been pulled in as a defendant, an actual party forced to answer the claims. Its lawyer was David Fink — a Bloomfield Hills litigator with four decades in practice, a former Assistant Corporation Counsel for the City, and once a cabinet-level officer in Governor Granholm’s administration.
Fink did something most defense lawyers never bother to do. He did not simply move to dismiss the case and walk away when it collapsed. He went after the lawyers who brought it. He moved for Rule 11 sanctions and asked the court to refer them to their bars for discipline — to go, in other words, after their licenses.
His framing was explicit and unmistakable. The opposing attorneys, he argued, had “used their privileges as members of the bar to spread dangerous lies” about the election. He described his own strategy in two steps: first stopping the Kraken, and then “caging the Kraken.” And the tell — the single detail that makes him the prototype for everything that came after — was what he said about money. The fees he could recover, Fink said, were “nowhere near enough,” because the lawyers were profiting from the litigation itself. The dollars were not the point. The point was the license.
Note this carefully, because it matters and I will hold to it: Fink’s own fees were never the prize here. He billed Detroit below his normal rate and discounted it further for his old ties to the City, and the money the court eventually awarded was reimbursement to Detroit as the prevailing party — not a payday for his firm. When Fink said money was not the goal, the record actually backs him. What he wanted was the precedent.
And understand who he was, because it forecloses the easy dismissal. Fink was not some crusading outsider who went looking for this fight. He was Detroit’s own longtime counsel, defending a real client that had actually been sued, doing what a defense lawyer is supposed to do. That is what makes the demonstration so clean: there was nothing improper about it. The precedent he set, however — the idea that the right response to a lawsuit you find offensive is to go after the other side’s licenses — was something else entirely. A lawful tool, used lawfully, that would shortly be picked up and turned into a machine.
He got it. Judge Linda Parker sanctioned the lawyers, ordered them to pay the opposing side’s fees, and referred all nine of them to their state bars for possible suspension or disbarment. The Supreme Court let the sanctions stand. Years later, an appeals court would revisit pieces of the ruling — narrowing some of its findings on First Amendment grounds — but the core held, and by the time it was revisited, the model had already been copied and scaled.
Fifteen months later, in March 2022, the 65 Project launched — an organization built to do at industrial scale precisely what Fink had demonstrated in Detroit. It came with serious names attached: a former United States Senator, a retired state Chief Justice, a former president of the American Bar Association on its advisory board. It had David Brock. It had a managing director, a communications strategist, a pair of researchers.
And on that launch masthead — listed not as a passing well-wisher but under the formal heading Consulting Counsel — was David Fink. Beside him, also Consulting Counsel, was Nathan Fink, his son, who had worked the same Detroit case at his side.
Now read the sequence, because the sequence is the argument. Fink’s motion came in December 2020. The sanctions and the bar referrals came down in 2021. Through all of it, the 65 Project did not exist. It was founded in March of 2022 — more than a year after the demonstration — and when it finally opened its doors, the man who had pioneered the technique was already standing inside, listed as its counsel.
Let me be precise, because precision is what protects this story. Fink did not file his Detroit motion “through” the 65 Project. He could not have — the Project was not yet born. He was Detroit’s lawyer, in a real lawsuit, defending an actual client that had actually been sued. The 65 Project was a different animal entirely: an outside political campaign that would go on to file its own complaints against its own roster of targets. The link between Fink and the Project is not a shared piece of paper. It is something more telling than that. They watched what he did in Detroit. They saw that it worked. They built an organization to do it at scale — and then they brought him aboard to help.
There is one more name on that founding masthead. It sits a single tile away from Fink’s. The title beside it reads, simply, Senior Advisor. The name is Melissa Moss.
You have almost certainly never heard it. Almost no one has. In nearly every story ever written about the 65 Project, the spotlight swings to Brock — the famous operative, the recognizable villain, the name that sells the headline — and the woman quietly listed as a senior advisor recedes into the background she came from.
That is a mistake. Because Melissa Moss is not background. Hold the name.
The name almost no one chased. The half-million-dollar trail that leads back to a house. In Part II, we follow both.
Part II — The Architect — follows the name nobody chased, and the half-million-dollar trail that leads back to a house.