What do you call ten thousand lawyers trapped at the bottom of the sea? A good start.
We have lawyer jokes like that because even though almost all attorneys do their work in professional and ethical ways, every once in a while, one of them behaves like a real sh*tass, and somehow, don’t ask me how, those sh*tasses all end up working for Donald Trump.
Trump’s first lawyer was Roy Cohn, who defined the word ‘scumbag’ as it is used to describe someone who goes out of his way to be as nasty, unethical, illegal, and as big a piece of sh*t as Roy Cohn behaved.
Then there was Michael Cohen, who was so desperate to work for Trump that he not only did anything and everything sleazy and underhanded that Trump asked him to do, but came up with more than a few scummy and illegal ideas of his own which he then carried out.
Finally, we end up this list of sh*t bags with the biggest piece of sh*t of all, which is obviously the guy who went from being the 107th Mayor of New York City to a drunk standing across the street from a porn shop in Philadelphia and telling a lie about election ‘fraud’ that he would repeat at least a thousand times over the next couple of years.
Giuliani, you should know, was named last month in a lawsuit by a former employee who claims she was asked to furnish Rudy with names of persons to whom he could sell Presidential pardons for two million bucks, payments he would split with Trump.
My sister is an attorney and a member of the New York Bar. At some point she went into financial journalism and has made a good name for herself, but I’m going to contact her on Monday and tell her that she might consider putting in a call to Trump and to ask whether he needs some more legal help.
Don’t get me wrong. My sister’s no sleaze. But maybe, just maybe Trump will finally realize that you don’t hire an attorney to help you get away with all the illegal things you want to do. To the contrary, you hire a lawyer who’s job it is to keep you from doing things you shouldn’t do. Which is something that Trump doesn’t seem to understand.
On the other hand (here I go again with the old Eisenhower press conference language ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that’) maybe Trump not only understands the difference between right and wrong, legally speaking, but it’s the legal profession that needs some catching-up to do in terms of what lawyers understand.
Yesterday, one of Trump’s attorneys, Jim Trusty, resigned from representing Trump for a second time, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ which is lawyer-speak that usually means either the client wants the lawyer to do something he can’t do, or the client is lying to his lawyer, or maybe both.
Trusty is one of at least ten attorneys who have pulled out of representing Trump since he began litigating the results of the 2020 election, but we also don’t know how many lawyers and law firms were approached by Trump and turned him down.
To that list, by the way, we have to add lawyers whom Trump has fired, of which there are at least three – Michael Cohen, the wacky Sidney Powell and, of course, Giuliani, whom you can’t say was ever Trump’s real attorney because he was never paid for anything he did using Trump’s name.
If there’s a lesson in all this merry-go-round appearance and disappearance of legal talent for Donald Trump, maybe it’s time the legal profession stopped using the term ‘represent’ when it comes to standing up in court to respond to something said by a judge. Maybe, legally speaking, there’s no difference at all between what an attorney says about his or her client in court versus when that same attorney is standing on the steps leading into the courthouse and talking to a gaggle of reporters about the client and the client’s case.
How many times have we seen an attorney get up in front of a bunch of reporters and state that their client is ‘cooperating fully’ with an investigation into the client’s alleged crimes? Have you ever heard an attorney say that they weren’t cooperating?
Meanwhile, the truth is that in the cases of Donald Trump versus this or that lawful authority, there has never been even the slightest attempt to cooperate at all.
And the day that some lawyer finally states that he or she will not cooperate with another witch hunt being carried out against Donald Trump, is the day that any irreconcilable issue between that attorney and that particular client will forever disappear.
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