Jim Trusty — which is a great name for a lawyer, if you think about it/say it out loud — has revealed his intention to withdraw from legal representation of former President Donald Trump in a lawsuit filed for the ex-president against CNN, which alleges defamation.
Trusty and another lawyer, John Rowley, have also distanced themselves from Trump in the new criminal case he is facing that originates with the federal Justice Department investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Donald’s harboring of sensitive documents from his time in office. Trusty’s ambition to exit Trump’s corner in the CNN case was tied in a filing to claimed “irreconcilable differences” with the client, meaning Donald. It seems, then, that it’s personal. Considering the legal exposure Trump has so often given himself in open and knowing terms, it must always be a pain to try and be Trump’s lawyer, representing a client who has repeatedly flouted input from the lawyers around him.
That trend extends even further than Trump’s actual legal cases, as he also repeatedly rejected the attestations of informed sources like then-Attorney General Bill Barr about the well-documented integrity of the 2020 presidential election. Barr is no liberal! And in the docs case, there has been documentation of other Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran having told the former president that no, he can’t continue holding onto documents the government had been trying to reclaim. We saw how that went!
Trump also touts his actions, having explicitly asserted in a CNN discussion that he took key documents, bolstering the idea that he acted with intent. It was also in a CNN discussion where Trump made further antagonistic comments towards writer E. Jean Carroll, who has said Trump sexually assaulted her. Carroll added a challenge over those later comments to a second defamation case that will go to trial in January of next year unless it’s suddenly resolved before that point.
