Defenseless.
This broke last night and instantly had me feeling nostalgic for an era in which getting some crazy-ass Trump news on a weekend evening wasn’t just normal but expected. The thing to understand here is that it’s extremely bad form for lawyers to leave a client in the lurch by parachuting out on the eve of a trial unless an issue’s come up that would make it unethical for them to proceed. Trump’s answer to the article of impeachment is due on Tuesday and his pre-trial brief is due a week from tomorrow. For his *entire defense team* to bail with those deadlines impending, forfeiting national fame and a place in the history books, almost certainly means they were being asked to do something egregious and couldn’t comply in good conscience. And we can all guess what that something is. Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, who were expected to be two of the lead attorneys, are no longer on the team. A source familiar with the changes said it was a mutual decision for both to leave the legal team. As the lead attorney, Bowers assembled the team. Josh Howard, a North Carolina attorney who was recently added to the team, has also left, according to another source familiar with the changes. Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris, from South Carolina, are no longer involved with the case, either… A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard. The AP is also hearing that his lawyers quit because Trump wanted to double down on the “stop the steal”: “According to a different person with knowledge of the legal hires, Bowers and Barbier left the team because Trump wanted them to use a defense that relied on allegations of election fraud, and the lawyers were not willing to do so.” Any attorney who walked into the Senate and repeated his claims of massive election fraud wouldn’t merely be lying about why he lost, implicitly they’d be in a position of defending the assault on the Capitol. By insisting that his lawyers argue to the Senate that the election really *was* “stolen,” Trump isn’t just refusing to contest the *actual* ground on which he was impeached (that he incited the violence on January 6); he’s effectively arguing that the violence was *justified.* Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) January 31, 2021 Even Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t repeat election-fraud claims inside a courtroom for fear of being sanctioned for deceiving the judge, a fact that caught the attention of Dominion’s libel lawyers. If Rudy wouldn’t do it, Bowers and Barbier ain’t doing it either. The Times’s account of the dispute also claims that Trump wants a “stop the steal” defense but adds extra dimensions: Mr. Trump had pushed for his defense team to focus on his baseless claim that the election was stolen from him, one person familiar with the situation said. A person close to Mr. Trump disputed that was the case but acknowledged that there were differences in opinion about the defense strategy.
