Member of the Oregon State Bar Recruits Fellow Lawyers for "Preservation of the White Race"

Email promoting "neo-Nazi" party prompts bar complaints.

Multnomah County Courthouse (Another Believer / Wikimedia Commons)

A Las Vegas lawyer who formerly practiced in Portland and remains a member of the Oregon State Bar has been sending emails to Oregon lawyers, inviting them to help form a new group for "the preservation of the white race."

The emails from Tadas Arlauskas recruit Oregon lawyers to discuss "white civil rights" in a think tank. Two of the lawyers who he emailed—one of them in Portland—have filed bar complaints against Arlauskas in the past month.

"My name is Tadas G Arlauskas," the email says. "I am interested in white civil rights ideas and subjects regarding the preservation of the white race. I would like to form a think tank interested in these types of theories and/or political ideas. (If you do not wish to read subject matter similar to white civil rights type of materials in general, or possibly white nationalism or white separatism, or to see symbols sometimes associated with such ideologies, then please do not examine the contents of the attached file.) If you are possibly interested in such theories or political ideas, or possibly forming a think tank, please contact me."

The attachment in Arlauskas' email sends recipients to the National Vanguard, an online publication that promotes the interests of the National Alliance, which calls itself "the leading organization advocating for the interests of men and women of European descent worldwide."

The National Alliance is a whites-only organization. "No homosexual or bisexual person, no person actively addicted to alcohol or to an illegal drug, no person with a non-White spouse or a non-White dependent, and, except in extraordinary circumstances, no person currently confined in a penal institution may be a member," the group's website says.

Related: 42 "hate incidents" reported in Oregon since Donald Trump's election.

Two of the lawyers who received the email from Arlauskas, David Coats, who practices in California, and Jesse Calm, who practices in Portland, filed complaints with the Oregon State Bar against Arlauskas. (Arlauskas says on his  resume that he practiced law in Portland from 2007 through 2011 and in Woodburn before that.)

Here's the substance of Coats' complaint, filed earlier this month and obtained through a public records request:

"Mr. Arlauskas operates a website, headlined with his name and the title "Attorney," in which he appears to promote the work of The National Socialist Movement, an American Neo-Nazi political party," Coats writes. "I bring this matter to your attention out of concern that an attorney licensed in Oregon is engaging in activity that potentially violates Oregon Rules of Professional Conduct 8.4(a)(4): 'It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to…engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice' by openly advocating for discrimination (or worse) against minority races. It is obviously in your discretion, but at the very least, in my opinion, this kind of behavior is prejudicial to the administration of justice and reflects negatively on the integrity of the profession in Oregon."

On Dec. 8, the bar rejected an similar complaint from Calm filed earlier.

Here's the substance of that response from the bar's assistant general counsel Daniel Atkinson:

"While we do not endorse or condone Mr. Arlauskas' interests or viewpoint, he is within his rights to advocate for that viewpoint without implicating our rules of professional conduct," Atkinson wrote. "Irrespective of Mr. Arlauskas' viewpoint, there is no evidence presented that he has knowingly intimidated or harassed any individual on any basis in the course of representing a client."

Arlauskdas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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