Donald Trump takes his ball and goes home
Donald Trump just spent the past few weeks wandering around the basketball courts with ball in hand, begging others to play with him, only to find that no one was interested. Now after having gotten rejected one too many times, Trump is taking his ball and going home, while telling anyone who will listen that he doesn’t need a basketball partner anyway.
First we saw Trump get rejected by Bill Clinton’s respected impeachment lawyer Emmet Flood. Then we saw Trump get similarly rejected by a series of steadily less respected lawyers. At some point Trump’s head lawyer John Dowd decided he didn’t want to stick around while waiting to be replaced, so he resigned. Then Trump announced that he was hiring Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, after he liked what diGenova had to say on Fox News. Now even the Fox News hiring has fallen through.
Depending on how you want to parse it, diGenova and Toensing were Trump’s lawyers for either six days, or two days, or they never were his lawyers. Were they fired or did they quit? Can either of those things happen if you were never technically hired, but merely announced as having been hired? Right now Anthony Scaramucci must be wondering how these folks managed to break his eleven day record. But you see, Trump did so little homework, he didn’t even know that Toensing was already representing Mark Corallo, who is cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The same lawyer can’t represent both sides. Apparently it took Trump’s handlers all week to figure out how to explain that to him.
So now that Donald Trump has even failed at hiring a Fox News pundit as his lawyer, he’s naturally blurting out that he doesn’t need a new lawyer: “Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case…don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on.” This is after Trump spent the past weeks learning the hard way that no lawyer wants to take this on.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report