The Georgia bar allowed Celebrity Kraken attorney Lin Wood to retire on Wednesday, saying that the lawyer’s permanent exit from the practice of law was a suitable resolution to his propagation of outrageous claims about the 2020 election and his own divinity.
Wood posted a letter on his Telegram channel in which he asked the Georgia bar to transfer him to retired status, while citing two disciplinary proceedings against him.
According to a filing obtained by TPM, the Georgia bar allowed Wood to retire after he lost the same two disciplinary proceedings against him for claims he made in several lawsuits alleging massive voter fraud, including for his involvement in Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” litigation.
During a January hearing, the filing from the Georgia bar said, a special master found that the allegations against Wood for spreading bogus information were true. At the end of a May hearing about “discipline” in the matter, Wood purportedly asked whether he could retire.
The state bar said in the filing that allowing Wood to retire — and never to practice law again — would “achiev[e] the goals of disciplinary action, including protecting the
public and the integrity of the judicial system and the legal profession.”
Wood only posted his letter asking to be allowed to retire, portraying it as a means to break free.
In a Telegram post accompanying the letter, Wood wrote:
“July 4, 2023.
“Independence Day!!!”
Wood’s life and legal career has had a uniquely American arc. After years in medical malpractice, Wood made a national name for himself by representing Atlanta security guard Richard Jewell, who was investigated over bogus allegations that he planted a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
In fact, Jewell had discovered the bomb and begun to clear the area before it exploded — a fact that Wood hammered home in defamation suits that he filed on Jewell’s behalf. Wood moved on in the 1990s to representing the family of murdered child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, similarly pursuing defamation cases over negative coverage of the girl’s parents.
In recent years, Wood had taken on more conservative clients — Herman Cain in 2011, Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann in 2019, and Kyle Rittenhouse in 2020.
After the 2020 election, Wood aligned himself with Trump in his bid to reverse his loss to Joe Biden. Wood told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in December 2020 that Trump was the unfortunate victim of a cabal of Chinese Communists, helped along by sympathetic GOP officials — RINOs, indeed.
“I’m not an alarmist, and I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” he told the paper. “But I know what’s about to happen. It’s going to look like a civil war, but it’s going to be a revolutionary war.”
Wood filed a lawsuit in Georgia challenging the election result, and signed on to Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” effort in Michigan to ask a federal judge to flip Biden’s victory in the state to Trump.
Neither of those suits achieved the desired result; instead, Wood has faced disciplinary proceedings since January 2021 from the Georgia bar over his mental health status. Wood appealed an order that he sit for a mental health examination, but lost.
Last month, the Georgia bar held a hearing in the disciplinary proceedings, while Michigan’s Attorney Grievance Commission formally accused him in May of misconduct in the effort to overturn Trump’s defeat.
Separately, three attorneys from Wood’s old law firm sued him in August 2020. The trio accused him of breach of contract, and alleged that he suffered from severe mental health issues — including allegedly expressing the belief that he was the second coming of Christ.
Wood has represented himself across these proceedings. He cited the disciplinary proceedings in his retirement request, saying that he was moving to do so to end them.
“The State Bar of Georgia has agreed to drop the disciplinary cases against me in return for my agreement to take the status of RETIRED,” he wrote in a separate post on Telegram.
Read the dismissal, Wood’s letter, and the response here:
