Trump’s team is not the best. But Starr, Sekulow and Dershowitz are stars. And that’s all that matters.
George Conway points out in this op-ed that Trump has really had to go to the D-list for attorneys. Sekulow is a religious fanatic who has specialized in Religious Right causes. Working for Trump is consistent with millions of Conservative Christians who have revealed themselves to be total phonies without morals and principles.
His former lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb weren’t the best. Emmett Flood and Don McGahn bugged out and the new guy Pat Cippolone seems to be willing to destroy his career writing legal documents that are barely literate.
I don’t think I need to mention Rudy.
Conway says that the top law firms wouldn’t work with Trump because he stiffs them financially and refuses to do what they tell him. Also, I’m sure they aren’t too keen on being associated with the most corrupt president in history. Apparently, they have reason to believe they’ll have trouble attracting the top law students to join, which is unsurprising.
But what Conway says about Starr and Dershowitz is interesting:
Dershowitz may be a genius in some ways, but he’s not necessarily the advocate you want on your side. Judges have told me they find him condescending in manner and tone — not the approach you want before a court consisting of 100 U.S. senators. And he’s wont to make off-the-wall arguments. As his Harvard colleague Professor Laurence Tribe has put it, Dershowitz “revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible.” Dershowitz’s recent assertion that the Supreme Court could order the Senate not to conduct an impeachment trial illustrates the point. Not only is that claim indefensible — it’s also ridiculous.
And then there’s Starr. I know and like Starr, but I can’t comprehend what he’s doing here. He’s best known as the independent counsel whose investigation led to the impeachment of Clinton. That’s hardly helpful for Trump, because Clinton was a piker compared with Trump.
Clinton’s core offense was to obstruct a private civil action about pre-presidential conduct and cover-up sexual misconduct — none of which had involved abuse of presidential power. From a constitutional standpoint, that’s a trifle compared with extorting a foreign nation by cutting off federal military funds in an effort to interfere with an upcoming U.S. presidential election.
As if that were not enough, in the Clinton case, Starr argued that Clinton had committed an impeachable offense by blocking witness testimony and documents. Oops.
You know George, it’s not hard to figure out at all. Maybe you had an epiphany of some sort (or something) but the most likely explanation is that Starr was always an unprincipled partisan just as you were then and he remains one today like most of your former buddies.
He concludes with this:
Any litigator will tell you that adding to your legal team on the eve of trial most likely will not produce better lawyering but, rather, chaos. In that sense, at least, Trump will be getting the representation he deserves.
Unfortunately, Mitch McConnell and the Accomplices (his new cover -up band) are planning to do everything they can to portray this legal chaos as perfectly normal and it’s entirely possible that much of the public will see it that way. Look at how the press is presenting Dershowitz’s inane argument that a president can’t be impeached unless he breaks the law in some way he determines is a “high crime.” (He says Clinton couldn’t be impeached because he defined it as a “low crime.”) (Dershowitz has discarded all the scholarship that says a “high crime” is a crime committed that only someone in a “high” position like a president or a judge can commit– like abuse of power or obstruction of congress, for instance. )
Anyway, he’s out there suggesting that whatever Trump did it didn’t violate an existing statute (whoever thought we’d need one?) so there’s nothing we can do. And it looks to me as if the media’s treating that minority opinion as if it’s perfectly normal.
He’s a star, dotcha know, and when you’re a star they let you do it. That’s Trump’s strategy for everything.