Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood puts license in jeopardy by refusing mental health evaluation

By Jan Wolfe and David Thomas

(Reuters) - An attorney licensing body on Friday said it has asked L. Lin Wood, a lawyer who played a key role in Donald Trump's attempts to overturn his election defeat, to undergo a mental health evaluation.

Wood said on the app Telegram on Thursday that the State Bar of Georgia had told him he needed to submit to the evaluation to keep his law license.

"My mind is sound. I have broken no rules. I asked what I had done wrong. I was only told it was about my social media comments. My speech," he wrote.

Wood did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Related: U.S. Appeals Court rejects bid to block Biden's GA win

State Bar of Georgia Chief Operating Officer Sarah Coole confirmed that Wood had been asked to undergo a mental health evaluation but declined to comment further.

The development comes weeks after Wood, an Atlanta-based defamation litigator, was banned from Twitter, where he regularly embraced conspiracy theories.

A Delaware state judge earlier this month blocked Wood from representing former Trump adviser Carter Page, calling claims Wood made on Twitter about U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts "too disgusting and outrageous to repeat."

Wood was also fired in January by a Kentucky teenager who sued media outlets over their portrayal of his viral stand-off with a Native American activist in Washington in 2019.

It is unusual but legal for a state bar to ask a lawyer to submit to such an evaluation, said Brian Faughnan, a lawyer in Tennessee who advises lawyers on ethics matters. Such requests are kept confidential, but in this case Wood "waived" that right to confidentiality by posting on social media, he said.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and David Thomas; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Bill Berkrot)