When a lawyer gives obviously bogus legal advice, he should suffer the consequences. It’s even worse when he gives obviously bogus legal advice to provide legal cover for what his bosses want to do.

So, as I understand it (and I may be wrong), the office of the president usually keeps a lawyer on retainer that basically serves to figure out legal cover for what the president is doing because, at some point, somebody might bring a court case. This has been done for a while. However, I suspect that most of these in the past have been more along the lines of minor separation of power squabbles that wouldn’t be a big deal most of the time. So, in such cases, the lawyer is just doing constitutional CYA for the president. That is, they are basically serving their part in an adversarial system.

Where this administration crosses the line is that they are going waaay beyond the limits of what is reasonable. They aren’t just stretching the rules a little bit, they are patently breaking them, and so they’ve worn the legal cover so thin that it’s basically worthless. Again, at what point does a lawyer say “Ok, now we’re not serving our part in an adversarial process, we’re just providing flimsy cover for a wrong.”