Here are the highlights of Gawker’s breathless account:

In 2000, Scott Brown was a freshman state representative in Massachusetts. A few years earlier, he’d served on the Wrentham, Mass. Board of Selectmen. Jennifer Firth, a local mortgage banker who was elected to the Board of Selectmen in 1999, filed a civil defamation suit against Brown in July of 2000, alleging that he had harassed her when she worked on his campaign in 1998, and then tried to smear her reputation around town with forged letters and emails.

According to Firth’s complaint, Brown engaged in “offensive” conduct that caused her to quit his campaign; he then tried to “defame and humiliate” her by spreading rumors to her colleagues that she “had made sexual advances” towards him during his campaign. She also alleged that Brown told several people that he’d had an “intimate relationship” with her and that he had a stack of sexually explicit letters that Firth had sent him. In her suit, Firth says that she’d never been sexually intimate with Brown, nor did she ever send him the aforementioned letters. A 2000 article in the local paper, the Sun Chronicle reported that Brown had denied the charges; for her part, Firth said she felt that filing the suit was “the only way I could stop this.”

The case then took a strange turn. Two days after the lawsuit was filed, Jennifer Firth’s lawyer, Harvey Schwartz, filed a motion to withdraw as her counsel, saying that “to the best of [Schwartz's] knowledge, information and belief, the above allegations [by Firth] are not supported by ‘good grounds.’” The next day, Jennifer Firth withdrew her suit. It was dismissed with prejudice, which means it can never be re-filed. Brown told a local newspaper that her lawyer had decided to withdraw after he was presented with letters and e-mail messages that proved she’d been harassing Brown. The day after she dropped her suit, Firth claimed she’d done so because “her lawyer told her she was unlikely to win it.”

Allow me to translate some of the legal mumbo-jumbo. Firth’s attorney filed a motion to withdraw the case, and in that motion cited to Rule of Professional Conduct 3.3 (a copy of the motion is reprinted here).  RPC 3.3 deals with “candor towards the tribunal,” which is a nice way of saying what to do when you find out your client has committed fraud or perjury. By moving to withdraw and citing RPC 3.3, Firth’s lawyer was making what is known as a “noisy withdraw.” This is a coded way of sounding an alarm to the court that the lawyer has learned that the client is attempting to perpetrate a fraud on the court.

Needless to say, this is rare. Even if a lawyer subjectively believes that a client is lying, the lawyer has an ethical obligation to zealously represent the client. RPC 3.3 does not come into play until the evidence of fraudulent intent is overwhelming. Usually, but not always, it would involve the client admitting to the lawyer that they have lied.

Moreover, even once the overwhelming evidence of fraud has come to the lawyer’s attention, the Rules of Professional Conduct require the lawyer to attempt to deal with it “quietly.” Normally, the lawyer would go the client and say, “Either we drop the case (or, withdraw the perjurious testimony), or I’ll be forced to go to the court.” The client will usually agree in order to avoid the embarrassment of a “noisy withdraw.” This is known as a “quiet withdraw” because the adverse party is not informed of why the withdraw is happening.

The “noisy withdraw” that happened here means that: (1) Firth’s lawyer received overwhelming evidence that his client was committing a fraud on the court; and, (2) she nonetheless refused to withdraw the complaint quietly. It definitely does not mean, as she claimed, that she withdrew it two days after it was filed because “her lawyer told her she was unlikely to win.” If that was the case, the complaint most likely would never have been filed. And even if the lawyer changed his mind about the chances of success two days after filing the complaint, it could have been unilaterally withdrawn, without prejudice, by filing a simple stipulation. [In saying that, I am assuming that Brown had not yet answered the complaint, which is a very safe assumption given that it had been filed only two days before.]

Two takeaways from this. First, Gawker has a serious credibility problem here. (I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that.) I’m sure the Coakley campaign knew about this lawsuit. They obviously talked to a lawyer, heard the same analysis I laid out above, and decided not to run with it because there was absolutely no merit to the accusations. Gawker, apparently, did not feel so contrained.

Second, contrary to popular opinion, not all lawyers are scumbags. Here, Firth’s lawyer was put in a very awkward position. Shortly after filing a complaint, he found out his client was lying. He had a duty to protect his client’s confidences, but he also had a duty not to participate in a fraud on the court. That’s a difficult line to walk, but all indications are that he did so perfectly.

I will patiently await Gawker’s retraction, which I’m sure will be forthcoming shortly.

UPDATE: Check out the comments to the original Gawker story. This is my favorite one:

Democrats will never prevail over the Republicans until they begin to use baseless claims. This is politics, goddammit, not moot court a Princeton.

At first I thought this comment must have been from a conservative who meant it sarcastically, but it’s not. The commenter is a regular at Gawker, and based on those comments is obviously a big liberal.

Isn’t that an amazing admission? “We’ll never win the debate if we tell the truth, so we’d better start making things up!” Wow! What has the Left come to? And, by the way, Princeton doesn’t have a law school, so if you’re engaged in moot court there it’s really, really moot.

Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it. Surely it’s time to start over.

The best explanation I’ve seen of this is over at NRO’s Corner blog from Daniel Foster. The whole thing is a must-read, but here is the gist of it:

[E]ach bill brought to the floor of the House is debated under its own “rule” setting the length and structure of debate, including which if any amendments can be considered. A given bill’s rule is created by the — you guessed it — Rules Committee and presented to the whole House for a simple majority vote prior to consideration of the bill itself. In this case, the Democrats would bring a “self-executing rule” to the floor that allowed for the adoption of the Senate bill when, and only when, the reconciliation sidecar is passed, thereby avoiding the need to bring the Senate bill to the floor for a separate up-or-down vote.

This procedure is nearly impossible to stop:

Unlike in the Senate, where individual Senators have broad discretion to steer debate and introduce amendments, the legislative process in the House is rigidly governed by the Rules Committee. This limits the Republicans’ options in fighting a self-executing rule for Obamacare. As one Republican House staffer put it to me today, “the Committee can do just about anything if they can get the votes to pass the rule.”

In case anyone was wondering how desperate the Dems are to pass the thing, here’s the proof.

If the Dems are going to ram this through at all costs—and I think that’s where we’re heading—I hope they do it this way. The use of reconciliation is unprecedented and unprincipled, as I explained here, but it has a certain empathic appeal. Dems can argue that they are simply letting the will of the majority prevail, which is always a powerful argument in a democratic-republic. But this is different. This is a pure act of political cowardice. They want to vote for the bill without actually voting for the bill. I think the Slaughter Solution will be a bigger rallying cry against the Democrats in November and 2012 than anything we’ve seen to date. Bring it on.

“Dude, you’ve got to take a personal inventory. You’re getting thrown out of a curling match.”

I’m not saying Rush is a racist. I’m very sure he’s not. But sometimes he is an ass. Why invite controversy just for the sake of controversy? Oh, that’s right—I  forgot. He does it for the ratings.

“I thought The Hurt Locker was great. It would have been better if a man had directed it, but I thought it was great.”