After the State Bar of Georgia asked him to take a voluntary mental health examination, lawyer Lin Wood filed a lawsuit against its representatives comparing the request to the Salem Witch Trials and alleged its general counsel “made public” a confidential inquiry. On Wednesday, the Bar members replied that the problem with that claim is that Wood himself made the request public in a social media post seen by more than 600,000 people.
“[Wood] also posted the State Bar’s grievance and the roughly 1,700 pages supporting it,” the Bar’s members noted in a 17-page legal brief. “Plaintiff cannot complain that his privacy was violated or that he suffered harm due to the disclosure of this request when he was the one who publicized it.”
Their legal brief links to and embeds Wood’s posts on Telegram, the encrypted social media app that Wood turned to after being banned from Twitter, shortly after the Jan. 6th siege of the U.S. Capitol.
Wood had claimed that the State Bar’s general counsel Paula J. Frederick “already made public” its confidential inquiry through comments to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which reported that she confirmed its existence on Jan. 29. The Bar responded that the problem with that theory is that Wood’s Telegram post was dated Jan. 26, some three days earlier.
The pro-Trump lawyer also claimed that “the only ‘evidence’” supporting the Bar’s request were “four, out-of-state grievances” and “comments posted to [Wood]’s personal social media.”
“This is incorrect,” the Bar members replied. “The factual record was extensive at the time the request was made.”
The Bar members said that much of the support for the inquiry came from Wood’s own words, both public and private in emails, text messages, and voice messages.
As revealed by Wood himself in January, the Bar’s nine-page summary recaps Wood’s post-election lawsuits, including his so-called “Kraken” complaints in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona with Sidney Powell. All of those lawsuits were dismissed, and the attorneys who brought them are now facing multiple demands for sanctions and calls for their disbarment.
The summary also reprises Wood’s conspiracy theories that Chief Justice John Roberts is a “member of a club or cabal requiring minor children as an initiation fee” and that former Vice President Mike Pence is a “TRAITOR, a Communist Sympathizer & a Child Molester.”
The Bar obtained many of the private messages it describes through litigation between Wood and three colleagues he previously described as his former law partners, two of whom claim Wood assaulted them. Their lawsuit described what they called Wood’s “erratic, abusive, and unprofessional behavior” from late 2019 to 2020. The former colleagues also claimed that they taped Wood declaring: “I might actually be Christ coming back for a second time in the form of an imperfect man, elevating Christ consciousness.”
Law&Crime exclusively published some of those partners’ recordings previously, along with tapes by Wood’s former business associate Dave Hancock, who previously served as the executive director of the lawyer’s non-profit entity #FightBack Foundation.
In a recording first brought to light in Law&Crime’s podcast “Objections,” Wood could be heard emotionally recounting his children’s request that he get treatment.
“Right now, they want me to tell them I’ll go to a mental health healthcare professional for regular monthly therapy however long it takes, which I’m never going to do,” Wood was heard saying of his children on one recording provided to Law&Crime.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten, who is presiding over Wood’s litigation with the State Bar of Georgia, previously rejected two of Wood’s post-election lawsuits. Wood unsuccessfully tried to force the judge to recuse himself on that basis. Batten declined to recuse himself so, in a ruling that Wood is currently appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Listen to exclusive recordings of Lin Wood on Law&Crime’s podcast “Objections”:
Read Wood’s response to the bar’s motion to dismiss and the bar’s response to Wood below:
(Screenshot of Lin Wood via WSB-TV)
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