By what laws can the DoJ be the plaintiff for breaking confidentiality of the First Lady? Quoting Techdirt: On Tuesday, the Justice Department sued Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former close friend of the First Lady, Melania Trump, who recently published a book about her relationship with Melania, including revealing phone conversations that Wolkoff had recorded. The complaint says: Under the common law, and in equity, Ms. Wolkoff had a fiduciary relationship with the United States of America based on her position of trust and confidence. Defendant served as an advisor on many aspects of the First Lady’s work for more than a year. She participated in confidential deliberations on sensitive topics, including on issues as varied as personnel decisions concerning the First Lady’s staff, the First Lady’s official initiatives, and communications with the media. Ms. Wolkoff owes to the United States a fiduciary duty to protect confidential information in her possession that she obtained through her service as an advisor to the First Lady. What are the specifics of common-law and equity that allow the DoJ to be the plaintiff?
The DoJ is the USA Or, more precisely, the attorney general (the head of the DoJ) is the member of the cabinet that represents the United States Government in legal matters. The US government is a legal person and can sue and be sued (subject to sovereign immunity), just like any other person. When they do, the attorney general through the department of justice is the natural person who does it. Now, if you are asking what the particular merits of this particular case are: that’s a different question.
The first thing to keep in mind is that, before appearing on the stand, an expert witness will have given a sworn deposition and delivered a written report of his or her findings. They could expect to be questioned about anything they say under oath that contradicts something else they said under oath. It’s not illegal for an expert to admit they were wrong before, or that there are other facts that support a different conclusion—indeed, a witness on the stand might be obligated to—but it might not do their professional reputation and their credibility with the jury any good, either. In the U.S., the opposing counsel is generally allowed to contact a witness, and take a statement, but may not ask the witness to testify falsely or offer any inducement prohibited by law. (See Supreme Court Rule (SCR) 173/Model Rule (MR) 3.4.) It would certainly be illegal for a witness to take money from both parties in the case without informing them or the court, or to swear that whatever the highest bidder pays them to say is their expert opinion. If this happened under direct examination, the lawyer would probably cut their losses by asking no further questions and getting the witness off the stand. Putting the witness on the stand would give the other side an opportunity to cross-examine them. Grilling your own expert as a hostile witness, even if the judge allowed it, would only make your position seem tendentious. Nothing stops an expert witness from giving testimony that is more helpful to the other side. They are witnesses, not lawyers, and their duty is to tell the truth, not to zealously advocate on behalf of some client.
Does criticizing public figures constitute libel especially in a private group? It depends on the specifics, but a priori your description suggests that the defense of honest opinion would be applicable. This is regardless of whether the subject is a public figure and regardless of whether the statements were in private --albeit non-privileged-- communications. Case law surely provides guidelines or precedents on how the details and circumstances of the events would fare on the parties' legal position, but I am not knowledgeable of UK/English law. Does X have a counterclaim for illegally accessing the data? The matter seemingly depends on how the religious leader had or gained access to the data. Even if he gained access by stealing or hacking a device or account, X would not have standing to [counter-]sue unless the device or account belongs to X. Be mindful of the possibility that third party might have made the disclosure to the religious leader. In that case, actionability (if any) of the disclosure only encompasses the third party, not the religious leader. X's intent that his statements stay only among the participants does not necessarily imply that participants' disclosure elsewhere is unlawful.
Defamation laws do not distinguish between charitable organizations and others: however, in the US there are special considerations for "public figures" (they are not afforded as much protection). The medium does not matter -- texting, blogging, letter-writing, whatever. The defamatory statement need not have been received by a wide audience – it suffices that the message was received by one person other than the person being defamed. A single defamatory act is all it takes: there is no requirement of there being an established and repeated practice of defaming. One way to defend against a charge of defamation is to show that the statement is true. An alternative is to show that the statement is incapable of being proven true or false (e.g. calling someone a "jerk" doesn't assert a factual proposition). A careful scrutiny of the actual statement, performed by an attorney specializing in such matters, is really the only way to know whether words like "may", "possibly" would make a statement an expression of opinion rather than a statement of fact. A person suing for defamation would have to have suffered a loss, but there is a category of false statements, per se defamation, considered to be so injurious that damage need not be proven. That included allegations of criminal activity and allegations of professional incompetence, either of which could be applicable in the context you are describing. The First Amendment provides much protection against such suits, which may not exist in other countries. Because of this, a law was recently passed in the US, 28 USC 111, which says that domestic courts will not enforce a foreign defamation judgment that is inconsistent with the First Amendment. [Addendum] This part is crucial: "The only people I've expressed my concerns to, aside from the organization itself, is my parents and my wife's parents. However, they have shared with a few friends...". If you alleged illegal behavior to your parents, that's a problem. If you only said e.g. "I have concerns", that's not a problem. It would also matter in what way you tried "to disclose to a U.S. based organization details of the foreign organization they are supporting that indicate it might not be on the up and up".
Cohen has ethical problems, but this is probably pretty far down the list. If he were lying about the law, though, that could be treated as a violation of Rule 4.1 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct: In the course of representing a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a third person. It could also be a violation of Rule 8.4: A lawyer or law firm shall not ... (c) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation; Although these would be violations of his ethical obligations, they probably do not rise to the level of seriousness that would result in any meaningful punishment. Disbarment would be extremely unlikely, though a censure is conceivable. If someone reported the offense, I would actually expect that the state would decline to investigate at all. Of course, all of this assumes that he was deliberately lying about the state of the law, which I think overestimates his competence. More likely, he's just an idiot and didn't know that he was wrong. Importantly, being wrong about the law isn't unethical; it's a presumption at the foundation of our adversarial justice system.
It's happened before in real life. Here is a 1994 article describing an Illinois criminal trial where defense counsel pulled the old switcheroo and sat a different person with him at the defense table instead of the defendant. The defendant, instead, sat somewhere else in the courtroom. After a witness misidentified the perp as the person at the defense table (not the defendant), the judge directed a not-guilty verdict to settle the case but sanctioned the defense attorney instead. The appellate and state supreme courts upheld the sanction (by a one-vote margin in both cases) but dissenting opinions noted counsel and defendant technically broke no rules. From the article: The dissent said Mr. Sotomayor's intent was only to show the unreliability of the prosecution's witness. Moreover, seating a client at counsel's table is customary but not required. Nor is a lawyer obliged [...] to help a witness make an identification. Also, here is a similar but not duplicate question.
The courts are never in such a broad position to rule on generic wikileaks evidence. Theoretically, a court could have to rule on the admissibility of a specific document, so in that sense the matter is always dealt with on a case by case basis. There is a &quot;document&quot; that purports to be somehow from Amazon, reporting that a certain grey building with no architectural charm in a nearby village is an Amazon data center. Legally speaking, nobody cares, but let's say that there is some legal reason why it matters whether the claim is true (I stipulate that the document passes the relevance test). The publicly-posted document has no probative value, because anyone can create a file containing the word &quot;Amazon&quot;. It looks like a cleaned-up OCR scan of a printout (hence the complete failure at non-English characters), and lacks any clear indicia of Amazon origin. Thus the party would have to establish that the document is authentic, and there must be a provable chain of custody from the author to the submitted document. Federal Rules of Evidence cover questions of authenticity and contents of admissible evidence in art IX, X. Nothing in rule 901 suggests that such a document would be admissible. Very theoretically, if they happened to also have the original paper document, there might be sufficient forensic evidence to prove that the document is traceably come from the purported source. The wikileaks document per se would still be inadmissible, but the (more) original document could be admissible.
Defamation requires communication to a third-party I can say (or write) anything I want about a person directly to that person and, unless it is a threat, they have no recourse at all. I can call them a liar, a thief, a Nazi, or a goat fornicator. Of course, I have to be careful – calling them a “bastard” might be a slur on their mother communicated to a third-party (them) which would give her a right to sue although that would require a literal and largely archaic use of the term. That said, you do need to check with your lawyer if you can redact names in the face of a subpoena - complying with a legal obligations is a legitimate use of personal data under GDPR.