The legal team for Donald Trump, a famously fickle and combative client, on Friday was in tumult again as the former president faces federal charges for allegedly mishandling classified documents at his Florida home.
Trump said he was turning to different lawyers to fight the charges against him and suggested that two of his top attorneys would be departing the case.
“For purposes of fighting the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time, now moving to the Florida Courts, I will be represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later,” Trump said on social media.
“I want to thank Jim Trusty and John Rowley for their work, but they were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and ‘sick’ group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before. We will be announcing additional lawyers in the coming days,” Trump wrote.
The two attorneys — Rowley and Trusty — quickly issued a statement saying they had quit.
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In a joint statement, they said they had “tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation.”
Rowley and Trusty said that since the Trump indictment has been filed in Miami “this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion.”
The pair called it “an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administration’s partisan weaponization of the American justice system.”
Blanche, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer who was most recently a partner at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, joined Trump’s legal team this year to defend him in a criminal prosecution in Manhattan.
Trump’s legal team has been marked by months of infighting, and the team has been seeking high-powered South Florida criminal defense attorneys for at least the past couple of weeks, according to people familiar with the local efforts.
One lawyer who turned down Trump as a client was David O. Markus, who most recently succeeded in defending former Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum against allegations he lied to the FBI and funneled campaign money to personal accounts. He also represented Hillary Clinton in Trump’s failed lawsuit against her. Reached on Friday, Markus declined to comment.
Trump’s team has also talked to Benedict P. Kuehne, who is well known in Miami-Dade County for representing people charged in state and federal courts on corruption cases. In 2014, he secured the acquittal of a Miami-area mayor accused by federal officials of taking a cash kickback in the restroom of a sports bar. Kuehne on Friday declined to comment.
Veteran Florida litigator Christopher Kise, who joined the team last fall before being quickly alienated by Trump’s other defense lawyers, was said to have a role in the search, according to Trump advisers.
Trusty signaled last night during an interview on CNN that there could be changes to the legal team after he demurred when asked if he would appear with Trump at his arraignment Tuesday. Trump advisers familiar with the matter said the departure of Trusty and Rowley came, at least in part, because of their repeated clashes with another lawyer, Boris Epshteyn.
The Washington Post has previously reported that lawyers on Trump’s team had threatened to resign due to repeated clashes with Epshteyn. In April, Tim Parlatore quit after Trusty, Rowley and Parlatore demanded that Epshteyn recuse himself from the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Epshteyn, however, continued to insert himself as Trump’s in-house counsel.
“There are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be,” Parlatore said on CNN last month after he resigned from the team, before specifically naming Epshteyn.
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Epshteyn, who is close to Trump, is disliked by some of his other advisers.
Epshteyn has taken the most optimistic view of Trump’s defense, with even the president sometimes mocking him for his sunny predictions. Trump advisers said that the former president will occasionally wave around his phone to show others that Epshteyn is calling and will mockingly predict he is about to get good news.
At one dinner this year at Trump’s golf club, Trump joked that Epshteyn would tell him everything was “great” even as he was being hauled off in handcuffs, according to people with knowledge of the comment.
Multiple Trump advisers said Epshteyn helped kneecap Kise, a longtime respected Florida litigator. Other lawyers have clashed in fights that have had to be mediated by Trump and his advisers.
Kise, for his part, has told others, The Post has previously reported, that much of the heartache could have been avoided if Trump and his team simply had taken a more cooperative stance with the Department of Justice.
Blanche was also representing Epshteyn for the classified documents case, and he remains his attorney.