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Funny how the burden of proof is never on you.
Is there any evidence that Baker was fired for petty reasons, did he even claim to be? Is there any evidence he inserted himself in the process in good faith? It could be true but I don't have evidence that at this point.
I'm not sure how you misread what I wrote to this degree. The post you are directly responding to explicitly said that it's possible that Musk fired Baker for lofty high-brow reasons. It's perfectly reasonable to place the burden of proof on the one making an assertion and my assertion in this case is "I don't have evidence to believe that". What objection do you have with my assertion?
You are instead asking me to provide evidence that Baker was fired for petty reasons, or that Baker acted in good faith. I never asserted either positions! I don't know if either of those things are true! How many different ways do I need to say this?
The objection I have is that despite inserting a thousand technicalities you can hide behind when called out, we're not in court, and I don't need to let you hide behind these technicalities, and pretend you didn't just say what you clearly said. The content of your comments clearly says that "it doesn't make sense" for Baker to not be involved. You're wrong, it does, and you have not provided any evidence for that not being the case.
Yes my assertion is indeed "It doesn't make sense to think the general counsel of a company is not supposed to be vetting files before they are disclosed to an outside party" and I stand by that position. You saying that I'm wrong is not enough to make it so. Can you actually explain how I'm off-base? As best as I can tell so far the issue seems to be that I'm not credulously accepting whatever Elon Musk said. I already explained why I'm suspicious of his claims, which part of my argument do you object to?
Do lawyers have any professional standards for conflicts of interest?
Yes, governed by model RPC 1.7 and 1.8 but I don't know how they would be applied for a general counsel exactly. Conflicts are most often considered "waivable" where so long as you have the informed consent in writing from the client it's not a problem. Conflict check is a tedious responsibility for support staff at law firms. I very briefly worked at a law firm after already being a public defender, and the staff asked me for the names of the hundreds of defendants I represented so they could check for conflicts (and if there are any, basically have me quarantined from those cases). I was lucky that I had kept a spreadsheet but I don't know how normal people would have dealt with that.
Do you think Baker had a waiver in writing from Elon Musk?
You used to work for the ACLU, right? Imagine you had inserted yourself into a controversial ACLU case that blew up, during which a coworker was caught forging documents submitted to court. Years later, you go to work for a different client with some tangential relations with the ACLU, and the aggrieved party in the controversial case. A new case comes up in the new company that has implications for the ACLU, and directly involves people who were directly involved in that previous controversial case.
Would you, as a lawyer, be comfortable sliding yourself into a "vetting" position for the new case? If you were, would you really be surprised if many other people were unwilling to give you a blank benefit of the doubt?
I worry I lost the analogy here, but the core question is, isn't CoI about the appearance of possible impropriety? I seems crazy that we would need direct, actionable evidence of malfeasance to allege a conflict of interest. Was Baker the only general counsel for Twitter?
I really don't know how companies deal with conflict checks but before Musk the entity that would need the waiver would be the "company" as represented by its governing body. I don't know if the company switching ownership requires Baker to proactively get a new waiver, or whether it's assumed that it's Musk's responsibility to check at that point. His previous work as FBI's general counsel was not exactly a secret.
Absolutely not, and I'd agree it's reasonable for people to be suspicious of me. I would be shocked if Baker was the only general counsel available to do this work, because "doc review" is extremely tedious work reserved as the lowest level of hell for attorneys. My assumption (depending on how big the volume of files is) would be they had a team of review attorneys do a first pass review of the disclosures and only after that was done did upper legal management step in for a spot check.
I keep wondering why my position is apparently so inscrutable to people because I never said that conflict of interest doesn't exist. I already said above "I think it's plausible that Jim Baker would at least have a strong motive to conceal things that would impugn the FBI which is his previous employer, but motive is not the same thing as commission." I think the pushback I'm getting on this issue is maybe that "I don't have enough evidence to believe Baker was acting in bad faith" is being interpreted as having a silent "therefore, he acted in good faith" follow-up.
For myself, I'm essentially taking the conflict of interest as a strong signal of probable bad faith, as in, a good faith counsel would have noticed the conflict, and assigned the task to someone else. Baker obviously did not, and that's the sort of thing that seems like it should need a very good justification, which inclines me to believing Musk (because the world of bad justifications is much larger than the world of good ones). And frankly, I'm pretty used to unconvincing, bored, boiler-plate denials from spooks, who often seem to kind of suck at advanced lying.
And generally, the context of Musk's takeover really seems like the sort of thing where Jim Baker in particular ought to have gotten a new waiver about this topic in particular. OTOH, it's not unreasonable to ask why Musk didn't think of this angle beforehand. On the gripping hand, Musk is doing a ton of shit, it's understandable if he drops a ball occasionally.
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