Donald Trump has spent his entire life avoiding comeuppance, but that streak may be coming to an end. He’s hopping mad that the FBI searched the resort he now lives in, throwing around one dodgy excuse after another — and helping inspire death threats against government agents the Republican party has long held up as heroes. But an FBI search is no joke, especially if it involves a former president. Trump seems to secretly know this and is reportedly on the hunt for rock star legal representation. Problem is, no decent lawyer appears to want to work with him.
“Everyone is saying no,” a prominent Republican lawyer told The Washington Post. That’s a shame because, as an attorney who once worked on the Watergate prosecution team, who also turned down Trump, what he needs is a “first-rate, highly experienced federal criminal practitioner.”
That attorney said his excuse was that he simply didn’t have time. Others, though, are scared off by his divisiveness, his prickly personality, and his habit of stiffing vendors:
One lawyer told a story from early in Trump’s presidency of his legal team urging him against tweeting about the Mueller probe, only to find he’d tweeted about it before they got to the end of the West Wing driveway. Several people said Trump was nearly impossible to represent and that it would be unclear if they would ever get paid.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer, who even went to jail for Trump, had no good to say about him. He described him to the Post as a “very difficult client in that he’s always pushing the envelope, he rarely listens to sound legal advice, and he wants you to do things that are not appropriate, ethically or legally.”
In other words, a lifetime of being, well, Trump is coming back to bite him in the ass.
It’s not that Trump doesn’t already have a legal team. But longtime confidants, the Post reports, are worried that they’re not experienced enough or up to snuff to deal with something as outsized as a federal investigation that may include potential violation of the Espionage Act.
“You get these guys who just live to be around him, and mistakes get made,” one lawyer told the Post. “These guys just want to make him happy.”
Meanwhile, his legal team is busy trying to get the name of the alleged mole who ratted Trump out. So you can see where their priorities lay.
(Via The Post)