Showing posts with label Lawyers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lawyers. Show all posts

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Trump's Legal Defense Team

Besides the Senate Republicans, Trump has defense lawyers defending him in the Senate impeachment trial.  By now the public has become familiar with Trump's peculiar choices in defense attorneys.  A quick synopsis of some of them and their connection to Trump follows.

Pat Cipollone served as assistant to Attorney General William Barr from 1992 to 1993.  In private life, Trump was a client of Cipollone.  Cipollone succeeded Don McGahn who departed (was fired) after he refused to fire Mueller as Trump requested him to do.  Cipollone has been the voice of opposition to the Trump investigations and established the obstruction posture regarding the impeachment demands of Congress.

Jay Sekulow has a history of making millions of dollars from businesses and charity organizations that he created with himself and his family members as owners.  The Guardian reported that documents they obtained showed that attorneys general in New York and North Carolina had opened investigations into one of Sekulow's charities for pressure tactics on donors and misdirecting money to him and his family.  Michael Cohen testified that Sekulow and other Trump attorneys made changes to his false statements about the length of time the Trump Tower project in Russia was ongoing.  Cohen testified that it was Sekulow who instructed him to lie to Congress and testify falsely about the duration of the project.

Ken Starr is best known for heading investigations into the Clinton administration known as "Whitewater."  He was initially appointed by the Bush administration to investigate the death of Vince Foster and investments in Whitewater real estate by Bill Clinton.  This was later expanded into investigating Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.  After four years of investigations, he released the Starr report, which stated that Clinton lied about his affair in a sworn deposition.  This led to the Clinton impeachment.  He was fired as president of Baylor University because he mishandled several sexual assaults there.

Alan Dershowitz has been involved in several high profile legal cases.  He is probably best known for his part as an attorney for O.J. Simpson during his murder trial.  He has handled celebrity cases for Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst and Jim Bakker.  He won an appeal for Claus von Bulow and defended Jeffrey Epstein as well being a consultant for the legal team defending Harvey Weinstein.  Dershowitz stated that he will take a minor role in the defense of Trump, speaking only to the constitutional aspects of impeachment.

Robert Ray has been the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and was the successor to Ken Starr as the Independent Council when he investigated and issued final reports on the Whitewater investigation and other controversies.

Pam Bondi is a former Florida Attorney General.  Bondi was the lead attorney general in the unsuccessful lawsuit intended to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  She argued that the individual mandate provision of the Act was unconstitutional.  Bondi joined with nineteen other Republican run states to allow insurance companies to charge people with pre-existing conditions more for insurance or to deny them coverage.  While Bondi was still attorney general, she hosted Fox news shows and appeared on the Sean Hannity show.  While Bondi was Florida attorney general, she first claimed to be joining a New York suit against Donald Trump for tax fraud in regard to the Trump University scandal.  When a few days later, she received a $25,000 contribution from the Donald J Trump Foundation, she decided to drop out of the fraud case against Trump.  In 2016, Bondi appeared at the Republican Convention where she led cheers of "lock her up" against Hillary Clinton.  In 2019 she was hired by Ballad Partners, a firm with close ties to Trump.  She also began working as a lobbyist for Qatar.  She was hired by the Trump administration to help with messaging during Trump's impeachment.

Jane Raskin is a Florida lawyer who represented Trump during the Mueller investigations.  Resistance to Mueller's requests for interviews came from Raskin and her husband, also a lawyer on Trump's Mueller defense team.