In an familiar tale, former president Donald Trump spent the weekend hunting for a new lawyer who will represent him in Florida on the classified document case.
Donald Trump spent the day before his historic appearance in federal court scrambling to find a qualified Florida lawyer willing to join his defense team as he faces the Justice Department’s first prosecution of a former president.
After touching down in Miami on Monday, Trump spent the afternoon interviewing prospective lawyers and meeting with his legal team, along with other top advisers, to discuss the case, in which he is accused of mishandling classified documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, according to people familiar with the sessions. Several prominent Florida attorneys declined to take Trump on as a client after two of the key lawyers handling the documents matter — Jim Trusty and John Rowley — resigned last week, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trusty and Rowley’s departure was sudden and unexpected, leaving Trump jockeying to identify a lawyer ahead of his Tuesday appearance in federal court in Miami, where rules require practicing attorneys to be a member in good standing of the Florida bar or to be sponsored by one before appearing. Veteran Florida litigator Christopher Kise, who joined the team in the fall and has an extensive network in the Florida bar, has led the search for a lawyer and cast a seemingly wide net in the state. Kise declined to comment.
The 11th-hour flurry of action to hire a seasoned trial attorney was a familiar dance for Trump, who has had difficulty hiring and keeping lawyers over the course of numerous federal and state investigations since his 2016 election as president.
Disagreements over legal strategy have hindered the search for new defense attorneys, according to people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Some on Trump’s team have pushed to pursue an aggressively partisan strategy in which they would accuse the Justice Department of prosecutorial misconduct and weaponizing the legal system against Trump. The other camp, a person briefed on the situation said, is urging the former president to put together a traditional defense team and believes that the case is winnable at trial through careful jury selection — one juror is all a defendant needs to convince to avoid conviction — and that a scorched-earth strategy could alienate a jury and the country.
Among those Trump’s team has approached about representation is Benedict Kuehne, an attorney well known in Miami-Dade for handling corruption cases. Kuehne was charged in 2008 in an indictment involving alleged money laundering, obstruction of justice and forfeiture accusations; the government dropped charges against him a year later. Most recently, he lost a civil trial defending a Miami city commissioner who was sued over allegations he used his powers to seek retribution against business owners who supported a political rival.
