Doug Mills/The New York Times Read in app By Erica Newland Ms. Newland worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18. I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president.
A day after the riot at the US Capitol, a White House lawyer advised an ally of former President Donald Trump to obtain a defense lawyer in connection with helping the Republican try to overturn the 2020 election results.
As postelection litigation rages in multiple battleground states, lawyers representing President Donald Trump include big and small names. Several lawyers withdrew after reporting pressure from anti-Trump activists that included posting the lawyers’ names and contact information on social media.
Last week, a federal appeals court rejected a request by other Trump-aligned attorneys that the court block some sanctions they’ve received for bringing a frivolous post-election case making unsubstantiated claims of fraud.
The orbit of former advisers and associates of President Donald Trump who have been indicted or found guilty grew Thursday when Steve Bannon, his former senior adviser and chief strategist, was ...
Last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had consulted with one of his divorce lawyers, Jay Goldberg, who is also a former prosecutor, about the question of whether Cohen, who seems to be facing a raft of charges for financial crimes, might flip, and become a witness against him. The idea that Trump would consult someone who was also his divorce lawyer on this point is another sign of how much his concept of the law centers on him and his personal needs. Goldberg said that he had advised Trump not to trust Cohen, or almost anyone facing a long jail sentence. The “attorney-client dynamic,” to use Comey’s phrase, between Trump and Cohen may, for the President, turn out to be explosive. And Cohen isn’t the President’s only lawyer, or his only problem. ♦
Often enough, Trump drives away lawyers when he doesn’t like what they tell him, a culling that might shape the character of the remaining herd. (A similar effect may be seen in the spate of resignations in the Republican congressional caucus.) But the rewards for staying in Trump’s circle are increasingly elusive, even for the ambitious or the public-spirited, who feel that it is their duty to serve any President. There is a growing prospect that the price for doing so is not only indignity but an indictment, or at least lawyers’ fees, when one is called as a witness.
The enlistment, last Thursday, of Rudolph Giuliani—the former mayor of New York and now a purveyor of security advice and partisan rants — as a personal lawyer to Donald Trump marked the entry into the President’s legal drama of another character whose presence was unlikely and yet somehow inevitable. It was of a piece with the moment, earlier in the week, when lawyers for Michael Cohen, another Trump attorney, asserted that a client whose identity Cohen was anxious to keep secret was Sean Hannity, of Fox News. That came during a court hearing that was also attended by Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress and director, who is in a legal fight with Cohen and Trump over a hush agreement. Giuliani says that his job is to quickly “negotiate an end” to the investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election—as if that matter, and related issues that Mueller has uncovered, were akin to a casino bankruptcy restructuring, in which debts and bad behavior can simply be swept away.
Sidney Powell, attorney for President Donald Trump, conducts a news conference at the Republican National Committee on lawsuits regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on Thursday, November 19, 2020. Lawyers for pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell said that “no reasonable person” would believe that her false claims ...
Trump was impeached in the House for inciting an insurrection, but was acquitted in the Senate. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who spoke at the pre-riot rally in Washington, on Monday repeated false election theft claims as he launched his campaign for the Senate.
In the court filing made public Monday night, Powell’s lawyers argued that Dominion’s defamation suit should be dropped because her claims were merely constitutionally protected expressions of political opinion, rather than declarations of fact. “Determining whether a statement is protected involves a two-step inquiry,” Powell’s lawyers wrote in ...
Lawyers for pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell said that “no reasonable person” would believe that her false conspiracies about the 2020 election were “truly statements of fact.”
Trump’s lawyers distanced themselves from Powell shortly thereafter — but she went on to file lawsuits making similar claims about the race being stolen from Trump and rife with fraud, aiming to decertify the vote results in key states.
Adams was well-known for his work at PILF whereas Mitchell was more of an "unknown variable," Cantu said. "I am not pleased with the appointment and would have welcomed another choice."
The conservatives initially wanted J. Christian Adams, a Trump-appointed USCCR commissioner who has, without evidence, alleged "alien invasion" by non-citizens trying to vote illegally in the United States and spent years suing counties to force them to purge voter rolls. Adams, president of the PILF group, was also a member of Trump's election integrity commission, which disbanded without finding evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election.
Citing lost business and reputational damage, Dominion filed a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against Powell and her colleague on Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani. A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats.
Powell was publicly exiled from the Trump camp a week after that tweet, after she appeared at a news conference hosted by the Republican National Committee alongside Giuliani, whose hair dye memorably ran down his face, and Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis.
Tom McCarthy. A key member of the legal team that sought to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump is defending herself against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit by arguing that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.
As Trump fought to reverse his election loss in November, the former president himself reportedly supported Powell’s claims in private – and trumpeted them in public, touting Powell two weeks after the election as a key part of “the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS”.
Erica Newland, counsel at Protect Democracy, worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18.
No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuatedan anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.
But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.
No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.
Clark was deputy national political director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, then became director of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House after the New York developer was elected president.
Powell was a federal prosecutor from 1978 through 1988, serving as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas. In the Western District, she helped win the conviction of organized crime leader Jimmy Chagra for continuing criminal enterprises.
After Santorum won in 1994, Scaringi became his legislative correspondent in Washington. Scaringi returned to Pennsylvania to work for Mike Fisher’s campaign for state attorney general, and served as an executive assistant to Fisher as attorney general from 1997 to 2001.
Bondi gained national prominence while Florida’s attorney general as one of the key Republican state attorneys general who sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2012.
William Consovoy, who has experience arguing before the Supreme Court, represented Trump in recent New York state court cases.
Pam Bondi is a former two-term Florida attorney general, elected in 2010 and again in 2014. Bondi, 55, already familiar to viewers of Fox News Channel, became a familiar figure early in 2020 as one of Trump’s lawyers during his Senate impeachment trial. She made strong arguments for the president on the Senate floor, ...
Marc Scaringi, a lawyer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is leading the Trump campaign’s legal effort in that state. Scaringi, 51, focuses his practice on business and corporate law and has about 20 years of experience.