Mar 21, 2022 · NewsmaxFacing high-stakes investigations that could cripple his business empire or even mean jail time for him and close associates, former President Donald Trump and his family’s armada of lawyers are facing a threat from within.Her name is Alina Habba, and—almost out of nowhere—the relatively unknown New Jersey lawyer went from representing a college …
Feb 03, 2021 · CNN and other outlets have reported that lead attorney Butch Bowers and four other lawyers he assembled for the team walked out over a disagreement about the ex-president's defense strategy but...
Aug 20, 2020 · Rick Gates A onetime deputy campaign chairman for Trump, Gates was sentenced to 45 days in jail and three years' probation in 2019 after admitting to helping Manafort conceal $75 million in foreign...
Jul 20, 2017 · John Dowd: The high-profile lawyer joined Trump’s legal team last month. The 76-year-old investigated former baseball star Pete Rose as special counsel for Major League Baseball, resulting in...
(CNN) 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 arrested and indicted.
Trump's onetime national security adviser, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his talks with the then-Russian ambassador about approaches that would undermine Obama administration policy before Trump took office.
Trump commuted his sentence this summer days, before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia.
In an interview with The New York Times in February 2019, Trump said he hadn't spoken with his former campaign manager "in a year and a half." He did, however, offer praise for Bannon as a top advocate during the President's impeachment who caught his attention.
The case has become a political lightning rod, with Trump and Flynn both saying he's been treated unfairly by the judge and the prosecutors who cut his plea deal. Trump has not ruled out a pardon for Flynn.
Richard Cullen: The vice president hired outside legal counsel about a month after Trump hired his own private lawyer to deal with the Russia probe. Cullen worked for President George W. Bush during the 2000 Florida recount and has represented GOP Majority Leader Tom Delay as well as Tiger Woods ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, during the couple’s divorce.
Jay Sekulow: Sekulow is a lawyer with his own radio show and has largely been the public face for Trump’s legal team. He is the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a Pat Robertson founded group meant to be the conservative answer to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Futerfas made his name as a defense attorney by successfully representing mobsters in New York City. He later expanded to defending corporate and white collar crimes, and more recently cyber crimes. In 2016, he defended a Russian man who was convicted in the U.S. of creating computer malware. Federal Election Commission records filed last month show Trump's re-election campaign began paying Futerfas' law firm more than a week before the June 2016 meeting became public.
Andrew Rafferty. Andrew Rafferty has been a political reporter for NBCNews.com since 2013. Rafferty writes and reports on politics for the web, and shoots and produces video for all NBC platforms. Prior to joining NBCNews.com, Rafferty was a campaign reporter covering the 2012 presidential election.
Chuck Cooper: The country’s top law enforcement officer hired his own private lawyer — a friend who helped him prepare for his Senate confirmation hearings — shortly after Vice President Mike Pence did. Cooper, a founding member of the Washington law firm Cooper & Kirk who once clerked for late Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, had been under consideration to be the next solicitor general but withdrew his name after Sessions’ contentious confirmation hearings. Sessions has denied any collusion with Moscow, but has come under fire for not disclosing at least two meetings he had with a Russian official during the 2016 campaign.
Abbe Lowell: The experienced defense attorney has defended Democratic politicians like John Edwards and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. He also served as chief minority counsel to the Democrats during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment process. Now he is representing the president's son-in-law and senior White House adviser, whose meetings with the Russian ambassador and a Russian banker last year have come under scrutiny.
That firm led failed legal fights in Georgia. According to The Wall Street Journal, Kurt Hilbert , a founder of the firm, was on an infamous January phone call between Trump and the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump urged Raffensperger to overturn then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
The checks continued to go to legal firms through Trump’s impeachment trial, where he was impeached for a second time by the House and exonerated by the Senate. Some payments to legal advisors were as recent as June.
True North Law, which led a failed fight in swing state Michigan, was paid over $270,000 for its services in January by the same committee. Harvey & Binnall, which was involved in a failed legal fight in Nevada, received over $300,000 in payments from January through June by the Trump PAC, according to the filings.
Jenna Ellis, one of Trump’s legal advisors during the recount, was paid more than $22,000 for her services.
Trump’s lawyers reaped a windfall during his impeachment trial.
Asked about the legal costs, Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump, pointed to the impeachment fight. The House, largely along party lines impeached Trump for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill. The Senate acquitted him, but some Republicans joined Democrats in voting to convict.
None of the FEC records shows legal service payments to Rudy Giuliani, who has called the president a client and publicly challenged the results of the election.
Larry Cleveland, Franklin County’s elected lead prosecutor , knows Farmer well and respects his work. Cleveland is a Democrat and does not support Trump. He said he wished Farmer didn’t go to the rally. But he also said the detective did nothing wrong in doing so.
Farmer, who is white, was popular among law enforcement and residents who’d sought his help with drug activity in their neighborhoods. But Goodrich and a local civil rights group knew his name because some of those Farmer arrested in recent years, including about half a dozen clients of the public defender’s office, claimed in court filings that he had improperly searched them, used excessive force or targeted them because they were Black.
In an interview, Ricketts, 53, said she speaks from experience because Farmer has arrested her son, a recovering addict, many times. “That tells me he’s doing his job,” Ricketts, who is white, said.
On Jan. 8, Goodrich and his colleagues sent a letter to Quire, asking him to investigate Farmer’s activities at the rally, and cases “which reflect targeting and racial profiling.”
The cases included a man facing charges for allegedly smoking marijuana in a parked car in 2019, who accused Farmer of jumping out, pointing a gun in his face and threatening to shoot him — allegations that a judge ultimately dismissed. Another man, arrested by Farmer on gun charges in 2019, accused the detective of making false statements in his application for a search warrant; that man pleaded guilty to reduced charges before a judge could hold a hearing on the claims.
Farmer said the “extremists” and “weak-minded” people who rioted had darkened an otherwise peaceful rally. He called the siege “embarrassing” and “disgraceful” and said he did not want to be identified with it.
The investigation was welcomed by some in Franklin County, but it angered Farmer’s supporters, who believed he had done nothing wrong in Washington and was targeted because he was such an effective narcotics investigator.
1. Steve Bannon : Trump's political Svengali was charged with fraud in August 2020 for a fundraising scam tied to raising dollars to build Trump's much bally-hooed border wall. The allegation, which Bannon has denied, was that he and others involved in the We Build The Wall group used money raised to pay for lavish personal expenses.
9. George Papadopoulos: Papadopoulos, a relatively junior adviser to Trump's campaign, was sentenced to 12 days in prison for lying to investigators about his contacts with individuals tied to Russia. Papadopoulos was defiant about his innocence; "The truth will all be out," he tweeted the night before reporting to prison. "Not even a prison sentence can stop that momentum." Trump pardoned Papadopoulos in December 2020.
6. Rick Gates: Gates, deputy to the campaign chairman of Trump's 2016 campaign, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting Paul Manafort in concealing $75 million in foreign bank accounts. Gates turned informant for the government as part of the broader probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and was sentenced to 45 days in jail.
4. Michael Cohen : The one-time fixer for Trump, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for a series of crimes, most notably secret hush-money payments made during the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign to two women alleging affairs with Trump. The sentencing judge said that Cohen had pleaded guilty to "a veritable smorgasbord" of crimes. Cohen turned informant on Trump and, in sworn testimony in front of Congress in 2019, Cohen called Trump "a racist," "a conman" and "a cheat" -- and insisted that the president was fully aware of the hush-money payments.
At least 11 people who played a role in Trump's presidential campaigns or his administration have been charged with crimes, with Tom Barrack, who chaired Trump's inaugural committee and has been a longtime friend, accused of illegal foreign lobbying on behalf of the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday.
3. Elliott Broidy: Broidy, a top fundraiser for Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, pleaded guilty in October 2020 to conducted a secret lobbying campaign in exchange for millions of dollars. As CNN's Kara Scannell wrote at the time of his Broidy's guilty plea: "Broidy was charged earlier this month with conspiracy for failing to register and disclose his role in a lobbying effort aimed at stopping a criminal investigation into massive fraud at a Malaysian investment fund and advocating for the removal of a Chinese billionaire living in the US."
In March 2016, as the potential for a contested convention increased, Trump hired Paul Manafort —who has worked in presidential politics since the 1976 Republican convention—as his convention manager. Trump also promoted Michael Glassner, a longtime aide to former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), to deputy campaign manager.
Ed Brookover, Trump's senior advisor who helped organize the Republican National Convention, was fired from the campaign on August 1, 2016. According to Politico, Brookover's firing was part of a "campaign shakeup," and two other Trump aides, William McGinley and Mike McSherry, were set to take on expanded roles in the campaign.
After being hired in April as an advisor to the campaign, McKay left in early June to advise the pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now. The super PAC told NBC News that McKay was a volunteer for Trump's campaign and that his decision to join the super PAC did not violate federal laws on coordination.
National Field Director Stuart Jolly resigned his position on April 18, 2016, after the campaign hired Rick Wiley to be the national political director. According to CNN, "Jolly was a longtime loyalist to Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and Jolly's departure shrinks the circle of loyal aides Lewandowski has around him as Paul Manafort, Trump's recent hire to manage the convention strategy, gains more clout in the Trump campaign." Jolly also stated, "I left. I wasn't pushed, I wasn't shoved, I wasn't asked to leave."
Sam Nunberg, an advisor to Donald Trump since early 2014, arranged in February 2014 for Buzzfeed writer McCay Coppins to write a profile on Trump for the website. When it was published, the profile cast Trump in a negative light, calling him "a man startled by his suddenly fading relevance — and consumed by a desperate need to get it back." When the article appeared, Nunberg was fired. In April 2014, however, Nunberg was rehired to his same position.
The second phase of the campaign began when Trump's hiring and promotion shifted from the non-traditional to more established consultants.
Wood claimed that Georgia's procedures for handling absentee ballots had been unconstitutional since March 2020 and sought to lock certification of the state's election results. Wood later also claimed that Georgia's recounting of votes was flawed.
His Twitter account was permanently suspended after the January 2021 storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. After the attack on the Capitol, Wood falsely claimed that members of the pro-Trump mob were antifa activists in disguise and that Vice President Mike Pence was a "child molester". Wood subsequently called for the execution of Pence on Parler, writing, "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." Parler removed several of Wood's posts due to violations of their community guidelines, including the one calling for Pence's execution.
Wood's lawsuit failed on November 19, 2020, when U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg, who was appointed by Trump, found "no basis in fact or in law" to stop Georgia's certification of its election results at such a late stage, as this would "breed confusion and potential disenfranchisement". The judge ruled that Wood had no legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and had brought the case too late. Wood failed to show that he had been harmed, while his proposal would "harm the public in countless ways".