Once upon a time, we had Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. Now we have Trump’s Saturday Night Mishegoss.
That’s Yiddish for “craziness.” And what could be crazier – and more hilarious – than all five Trump impeachment lawyers quitting on the eve of his Senate trial?
It’s true, people. The news broke overnight that Trump’s legal eagle quintet has flown to freedom, after realizing that the risk of irrevocably ruining their reputations was way too high.
They had reportedly been prepared to mount a narrow legalistic defense, arguing that it would be unconstitutional to convict an ex-president. But the insurrectionist-in-exile wants something a lot more…shall we say…robust. He wants lawyers to sign on to his Big Lie, the lie that bestirred the saps to storm Capitol Hill. He wants lawyers who will stand before the Senate and echo his delusion that he did nothing wrong because The Election Was Stolen.
And that is where his legal team drew the line. Because it just so happens that a Big Lie defense violates the letter and spirit of the legal code of ethics.
Rule 3.1 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct decrees that a lawyer shall not bring an action that has no grounding in law or fact. In plain English, you can’t mount a defense that has no factual basis. And similarly, Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure says that a lawyer’s contentions must have, or are reasonably likely to have, evidentiary support.
You see the problem. As Elie Honig, an ex-prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, told CNN early this morning, “Lawyers generally have a very broad obligation to represent their clients – criminal defending, impeachment defending, whatever it may be…But if a defense lawyer believes he is being made to make an argument that is either a lie or dangerous or unethical, that’s where you see resignations like this.”
The five lawyers correctly recognized that their nutcase client’s Big Lie had already been stomped to cinders by every judge that had entertained it in court. So naturally, the lawyers all decided there was no point in soiling their careers for a fascist meshuggener (crazy person). That might be fine for hapless bootlickers like Kevin McCarthy, but not for anyone with a scintilla of integrity.
When I heard that the lawyers were all quitting, I flashed on a passage in one of Bob Woodward’s books – specifically, page 268 in Fear – where he quoted one of Trump’s White House rants: “I have terrible lawyers…I’ve got a bunch of lawyers who are not aggressive, who are weak, who don’t have my best interests in mind, who aren’t loyal. It’s just a disaster. I can’t find a good lawyer.”
Translation: A “good” lawyer is a “loyal” lawyer, and “loyal” lawyer will do whatever the client says, at whatever cost to the lawyer’s reputation. That deal worked for Roy Cohn, a mobbed-up sleaze who didn’t care what the legal profession thought of him, but this weekend it was a bridge too far for Butch Bowers, Deborah Barbier, Josh Howard, Johnny Gasser, and Greg Harris.
I thought back to a conversation I had in 2018 with David Rudovsky, a veteran Philadelphia lawyer who’d practiced criminal defense law for decades. He told me that Trump’s awful rep was legendary: “We’re talking about the client from hell…You’re dealing with someone who has no regard for the truth. He has never built a trustworthy relationship with a lawyer…He’s uncontrollable.”
Granted, the Senate GOP’s insurrectionist fellow travelers will let Trump off the hook no matter what, but it’ll still be fascinating to see what happens next. Legal briefs for the Senate trial are due in a few days, and there’s nobody to draft them. Rudy Giuliani can’t fill the breach because he helped incite the rabble, which makes him a potential witness. Sidney Powell can’t do it because she’s too nuts even for Trump. Perhaps Marjorie Taylor Greene can simply stop the trial by summoning those Jewish space lasers.
At this late date there’s only one option: Trump needs Saul “Better Call Saul” Goodman. The fabled Breaking Bad lawyer, who earned his law degree at something called the University of American Samoa, would be happy to argue the Big Lie. As he once said on the show, “If you’re committed enough, you can make any story work. I once convinced a woman I was Kevin Costner – and it worked, because I believed it!”
As long as he doesn’t expect to get paid.