Donald Trump’s legal team circles the drain
Over the past month we’ve watched Donald Trump try to hire a series of less respectable attorneys, starting with the Bill Clinton impeachment guy and ending with the Fox News conspiracy guy, only to be rebuffed every step of the way before declaring on Twitter that he didn’t need a new lawyer. He then secretly hired one anyway. To underline how bad things have gotten for his legal team, Trump was represented in court on Friday by an attorney he had just hired on Wednesday. Now it’s gotten even worse.
As Palmer Report documented on Friday, Trump is now being represented by an attorney named Joanna Hendon. Now it’s become murky as to whether she’s even really joined his team or if she’s merely a stand-in, because CNN is reporting that Trump has tried and failed to hire yet another attorney named Steven Molo. Did Trump hire Hendon before or after Molo turned him down? That’s not clear. What is clear is that this is getting uglier by the minute.
Hendon had to ask the judge for a brief delay on Friday, arguing that she was too new to the case and therefore wasn’t up to speed on it. So why was Trump even being represented by someone who had only been on the job for forty-eight hours? As we’ve previously documented, now that John Dowd has resigned, Trump’s most competent attorney is Ty Cobb. But Cobb is not really Trump’s attorney, as he’s instead on the White House payroll. The only other person on Trump’s legal team is Jay Sekulow, who has no relevant experience.
Donald Trump’s decision to save money by putting Cobb on the White House payroll, at the expense of attorney-client privilege, is a reminder that Trump is such a cheapskate, he doesn’t want to hire anyone legitimately. But this is also reminder that Trump is so unstable, and so legally screwed, few attorneys are even willing to take his hopeless case.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report