Litigation has always been a favorite weapon of Donald Trump’s but, according to new reports, he might be having a tough time recruiting lawyers to his legal team right now.
Currently, Trump is preparing to face off against the House Oversight Committee investigating the Jan. 6th insurrection he helped launch. The plan was to argue against over 40 documents being released by the National Archives to the committee that contained sensitive information about his final months in office. Trump is hoping to argue executive privilege, a loophole presidents have been able to exploit since the Watergate scandal to keep specific records of their time in office confidential. Basically, Trump doesn’t want the House to get their hand on documents detailing the inner workings of his administration, and he’s trying to wield the power of the courts to make that happen.
The only problem? No one worth their salt wants to represent him.
In a recent CNN report, several people who have knowledge of Trump’s current legal predicaments allege that the former president’s team has reached out to a handful of top conservative lawyers around the country and no one has answered the call. In fact, plenty of lawyers who once defended Trump in court during his presidency are now sitting on the sidelines, refusing to help him with one of the more complicated legal battles he’s faced since leaving office.
“It’s not a 10-foot pole,” John Yoo, a University of California at Berkeley law professor told CNN when asked how far these firms would go to distance themselves from Trump. “It’s a 1,000-foot pole.”
Their reasoning is fairly easy to guess. Some are reportedly worried Trump won’t pay them — he has a history of stiffing his employees. Others have seen the legal consequences their fellow attorneys are now facing — both Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell are now defendants in billion-dollar defamation suits after representing Trump — and they just don’t want that kind of trouble. Even big names like white-collar crime lawyer William Burck who represented 11 Trump associates in and after the Mueller investigation have repeatedly turned the former president down in recent months.
It’s almost sad, knowing how much he loves to sue people, that Trump can’t even get members of longtime partner firms to come to his aid. Maybe he should enlist the services of that MAGA rioter who demanded to represent himself in court and accidentally admitted to committing even more felonies in the process? He seems like a pretty sharp guy.
(Via CNN)