Once again, Donald Trump finds himself in need of a few good lawyers, and once again he can’t find them. As The Washington Post reports, his “current legal team includes a Florida insurance lawyer who’s never had a federal case, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company, and a former host at far-right One America News.”
He’s never been in greater need of a lot of lawyers on a lot of fronts, including criminal defense. Daily Kos’ Brandi Buchman notes that there are so many probes right now that he “needs a small army of attorneys.” He is “under scrutiny from nearly every angle, from the search of Mar-a-Lago for White House records to the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of Jan. 6 to the civil and criminal investigations of his taxes and real estate dealings under the Trump Organization banner.” And don’t forget Georgia, where he’s under investigation by District Attorney Fani Willis for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“Everyone is saying no,” a prominent Republican lawyer told the Post. He needs some heavy-duty criminal defense representation, and they’re not touching him with a ten-foot pole. “Trump’s search is being hampered by his divisiveness, as well as his reputation for stiffing vendors and ignoring advice,” the Post explains. That’s making the people in his orbit who inexplicably remain on his side “extremely worried” because his “current stable of lawyers” is about as competent as the crew that latched onto him in all of his election challenges.
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The current Trump mouthpiece, Taylor Budowich, strongly denies that the team is concerned. “The President’s lead counsel in relation to the raid of his home, Jim Trusty and Evan Corcoran, have decades of prosecutorial experience and have litigated some of the most complex cases in American history,” Budowich said. “President Trump is represented by some of the strongest attorneys in the country, and any suggestion otherwise is only driven by envy.”
Right, they’re all just jealous of ... something?
Michael Cohen, the former Trump toady who is now happy to dish on his old boss, piled on. “In olden days, he would tell firms representing him was a benefit because they could advertise off it. Today it’s not the same,” Cohen said. His experience is a bit of a cautionary tale, given the time in jail he spent on Trump’s behalf. “He’s also a very difficult client in that he’s always pushing the envelope, he rarely listens to sound legal advice, and he wants you to do things that are not appropriate, ethically or legally.” Who wouldn’t want to be associated with that?
Potential counsel could also be remembering the total fiasco that was Trump’s 62 election challenges, where lawyers dropped out of the enterprise like flies and judges were not amused. This clip from the Jan. 6 committee with Rep. Zoe Lofgren shows just how unamused judges were.
Any self-respecting defense attorney is not going to be willing to antagonize judges with the kinds of antics Trump will demand.
Or, as Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the faculty director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute and the Harvard Trial Advocacy Workshop, puts it: “Some lawyers may reasonably feel as though the public will conflate Mr. Trump’s policy aims and positions with the lawyer’s. In that way, many lawyers may be disinclined to expose themselves to the public opprobrium that would follow that sort of representation.”
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