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    Trump’s Allies Pledged Loyalty to Him. Until They Didn’t.

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    The former president is facing down Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer, in a Manhattan courtroom, while other ex-loyalists are cooperating in a case against him in Georgia.Donald J. Trump could not hide his anger. Sitting at the front of a crowded New York courtroom this week, he folded his arms tightly across his chest. He tossed his head and scowled. He stared into the middle distance and scrolled through his phone.His ire was directed at Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had taken the witness stand 15 feet away and had promptly called Mr. Trump a liar. Mr. Cohen has told his share of lies as well. But in court, he swore he had done so “at the direction of, in concert with and for the benefit of Mr. Trump.”Mr. Cohen’s two days of dramatic testimony this week provided the first glimpse of what could become a familiar scene: Mr. Trump, sitting at a defense table, watching as a lawyer who once did his bidding now cooperated with the authorities seeking to hold him to account.On the same day Mr. Cohen began his testimony, Jenna Ellis, who had sought to help Mr. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, pleaded guilty to state charges in Georgia. She was preceded by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both lawyers who worked with Mr. Trump’s campaign, both now expected to cooperate in the criminal case that the Georgia prosecutors brought against him.The circumstances surrounding the Georgia criminal case and the Manhattan civil fraud trial are vastly different. But near the center of each case are lawyers who pledged public fealty to Mr. Trump — until they very publicly did not.Mr. Trump has long relied on a phalanx of legal attack dogs to speak on his behalf, or to do or say things he would rather not do or say himself. And because Mr. Trump has such a tenuous relationship with the truth, those lieutenants often spread a message that prosecutors and investigators consider to be outright lies. Lies about an election he lost, a relationship with a porn star he may have had and a net worth he may not quite have achieved.Now those statements are ricocheting back at Mr. Trump as he contends with the civil trial in New York, brought by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, and with four criminal indictments up and down the East Coast. And while Mr. Trump is quick to blame his betrayers — Mr. Cohen is “proven to be a liar,” he said outside the courtroom this week — his predicament was born from his own lopsided approach to relationships.Mr. Trump has a history of disavowing people who were once close to him and find themselves in trouble. He had long since cut ties with Mr. Cohen — until Tuesday, they had not seen each other in five years — and more recently he distanced himself from the lawyers in the Georgia case. He had also refused to pay their mounting legal bills.Their relationships, a one-way street flowing in Mr. Trump’s direction, appeared to work for a time. But when those loyal soldiers faced their own legal jeopardy, their allegiance to the former president became strained or even shattered.There have been exceptions since Mr. Trump’s split with Mr. Cohen. Mr. Trump’s political action committee has picked up the legal bills for his co-defendants in the federal criminal case involving his handling of classified government documents, as well as those of several witnesses connected to the case.Mr. Trump’s company also agreed to dole out a $2 million severance payment to his longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, and continues to pay for Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers. Mr. Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud and testified at the company’s criminal trial last year, but has stopped short of turning on Mr. Trump.Mr. Cohen was among several in a series of people who Mr. Trump turned to over decades in the hopes they would emulate his first fixer and defender, the lawyer Roy Cohn. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Mr. Trump told one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, in an interview. “He brutalized for you.”That brutality — along with Mr. Cohn’s method of conflating public relations defenses with legal ones, making showy displays in court and accusing the federal government of “Gestapo-like tactics” against Mr. Trump in a 1970s suit alleging housing discrimination — became Mr. Trump’s preferred model for a lawyer.Mr. Cohen has often said that those sort of tactics influenced what Mr. Trump looks for in those who defend him.While it is unclear how useful Ms. Ellis and the other two lawyers will be to the case against Mr. Trump in Georgia, Mr. Cohen has already been tormenting Mr. Trump for the last five years. Ms. Ellis became critical of him publicly in the last several months.Mr. Trump made a point of attending the trial in Manhattan this week to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony in person.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesFor Mr. Trump, the feud with Mr. Cohen is personal. Although he is running for president and fighting the four indictments, none of those obligations could pry him away from the Manhattan courtroom to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony. Mr. Trump did not have to attend the testimony, but people close to him say he believes events go better for him when he is present.Mr. Trump’s falling out with Mr. Cohen stemmed from their dealings with the porn star Stormy Daniels.In the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to silence her story of an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier — an affair that Mr. Trump denied had ever taken place.The deal came to light in 2018, and soon, the F.B.I. had searched Mr. Cohen’s home and office. As Mr. Cohen’s life imploded, Mr. Trump began to distance himself from his fixer, and eventually, his company stopped paying Mr. Cohen’s legal bills altogether.Mr. Cohen soon lashed out and began to speak with prosecutors. When he pleaded guilty that year for his role in the hush-money deal, he stood up in court and pointed the finger at the then-president. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen declared, had directed the payment of the hush money.Although the federal prosecutors declined to indict Mr. Trump, this year the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against him related to the deal, using Mr. Cohen as a potential star witness for a trial scheduled to start in the spring. Mr. Cohen has also testified before Congress that the former president’s company had manipulated financial statements to reach Mr. Trump’s desired net worth. That testimony was the catalyst for Ms. James to open her investigation.When Ms. James’s team questioned Mr. Cohen on Tuesday, he repeated many of the same accusations, testifying that Mr. Trump had directed him to “reverse engineer” annual financial statements to reach the former president’s desired net worth.Mr. Cohen spoke calmly and confidently as he recounted Mr. Trump’s obsession with his net worth.But the Trump team’s cross-examination exposed the perils of relying on a disgruntled former aide, especially one as temperamental as Mr. Cohen.Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on Mr. Cohen’s inconsistent statements about the former president and his own crimes, leading him to admit to having lied a number of times. Toward the end of the second day of cross-examination, Mr. Cohen appeared visibly flustered as he tripped over rapid-fire questions about whether Mr. Trump had personally directed him to inflate numbers on his annual financial statements. Mr. Cohen said he had not, prompting Mr. Trump and one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, to throw their hands up in victory.Ms. Habba also resurfaced a series of glowing remarks Mr. Cohen once made about his boss, further underscoring his about-face.“I think he’s going to be an amazing president”; “I’m the guy who would take the bullet for the president”; “I think the world of him, I respect him as a business man and I respect him as a boss,” Ms. Habba emphatically read, as she circled the courtroom with a hand-held microphone like a preacher delivering a sermon.This appeared to delight Mr. Trump, who turned to watch Ms. Habba while draping his arm over her empty chair.Before Mr. Cohen completed his testimony on Wednesday, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Justice Arthur J. Engoron to dismiss the case, citing Mr. Cohen’s contradictions.Justice Engoron denied the request, and Mr. Trump stormed out of the courtroom.Kate Christobek More

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      For Trump’s Lawyers, Legal Exposure Comes With the Job

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      The many lawyers who have helped the former president avoid removal from office and indictment have drawn legal problems of their own.A dark joke has begun circulating among lawyers following the many legal travails of former President Donald J. Trump: MAGA actually stands for “making attorneys get attorneys.”Over six years and nine major investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and local prosecutors, as Mr. Trump has managed to avoid removal from the presidency and indictment, it has become clear that serving as one of his lawyers is a remarkably risky job — and one that can involve considerable legal exposure. Time after time, his attorneys have been asked to testify as witnesses to potential crimes — or come under scrutiny as possible criminal conspirators themselves.While the consequences his lawyers faced were extraordinary when Mr. Trump was in the White House, the dangers have only intensified since he left office and have become increasingly acute in recent weeks, as the former president has come under scrutiny in two different Justice Department investigations and has been forced yet again to find lawyers willing to represent him.Last week, a Justice Department filing revealed that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had misled federal investigators about whether he had handed over to the Justice Department all the classified documents he took from the White House when he left office. That raised questions about whether the lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, could be prosecuted themselves and might ultimately be forced to become witnesses against their client. (Ms. Bobb recently retained a lawyer, according to a person familiar with the situation.)The revelation capped a summer in which a team of lawyers that had been advising Mr. Trump as he tried to overturn the 2020 election faced a range of repercussions across the country from federal investigators, local prosecutors, state bar associations and government accountability groups.One of Mr. Trump’s highest-profile lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was named as a target in a state criminal investigation in Georgia. The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who came up with what he conceded privately was an unlawful strategy to help Mr. Trump overturn the election, said he believed he was a target in that same investigation and declined to answer questions while being deposed before a grand jury. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman have also been named as subjects of interest in a flurry of federal grand jury subpoenas seeking evidence about attempts by Mr. Trump’s allies to create fake slates of electors to help keep him in office.Two others who worked for Mr. Trump in the White House — the White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone and his deputy Patrick F. Philbin — were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the roles that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman had played in helping Mr. Trump.Mr. Cipollone, Mr. Philbin and at least nine other lawyers who worked for Mr. Trump have testified before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Earlier this year, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin also were interviewed by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation into the classified documents investigation.A video clip of John Eastman, left, invoking the Fifth Amendment during a deposition for the House Jan. 6 committee was shown in a hearing this summer.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd 17 mostly lesser-known lawyers who represented Mr. Trump in battleground states as he tried to overturn the election are facing ethics complaints, putting them at risk of being disciplined or disbarred by bar associations or the courts.Vigorously defending the client — even one known for unscrupulous behavior or accused of an egregious crime — is part of a lawyer’s basic job description. But attorneys are bound by a code of professional conduct that forbids them from crossing certain lines, including knowingly making false claims, filing frivolous lawsuits or motions, and doing anything to further a crime.The adage for lawyers representing clients accused of criminality, said Fritz Scheller, a longtime Florida defense lawyer, is that at the end of the day, no matter how bad it may have been for the client, the lawyer still gets to walk out the front door of the courthouse without any personal legal issues.“That bad day for the criminal defense attorney becomes his worst day when he leaves through the courthouse door used for defendants on their way to jail,” Mr. Scheller said.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Impeachment Defense Team: Twisted Facts and Other Staples of the Trump Playbook

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentFriday’s HighlightsDay 4: Key TakeawaysWhat Is Incitement?Trump’s LawyersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFor the Defense: Twisted Facts and Other Staples of the Trump PlaybookThe lawyers representing the former president in his impeachment trial are the latest in a rotating cast that has always had trouble satisfying a mercurial and headstrong client.Two of Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr., left, and Michael van der Veen, arrived at the Capitol on Friday. For many reasons, serving as one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers is a true high-wire act.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesMichael S. Schmidt and Feb. 12, 2021Updated 9:39 p.m. ETEver since Donald J. Trump began his run for president, he has been surrounded by an ever-shifting cast of lawyers with varying abilities to control, channel and satisfy their mercurial and headstrong client.During the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, Michael D. Cohen arranged for hush money payments to be made to a former pornographic film actress. In the second year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, John M. Dowd, the head of the team defending the president in the Russia investigation, quit after he concluded that Mr. Trump was refusing to listen to his counsel.By Mr. Trump’s third year in office, he had found a new lawyer to do his bidding as Rudolph W. Giuliani first undertook a campaign to undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr. and then helped lead the fruitless effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, with stops in Ukraine and at Four Seasons Total Landscaping along the way.On Friday, the latest members of Mr. Trump’s legal cast took center stage in his impeachment trial and for the most part delivered exactly what he always seems to want from his lawyers: not precise, learned legal arguments but public combat, in this case including twisted facts, rewritten history and attacks on opponents.Despite an often unorthodox and undisciplined approach from his legal teams, Mr. Trump has survived more legal challenges as president than any of his recent predecessors. Although federal investigators uncovered the hush money payments and significant evidence he may have obstructed the Russia investigation, he was never charged. He was acquitted by the Senate in his first impeachment trial related to the Ukraine pressure campaign, and he appeared poised on Friday to see a similar outcome in this impeachment.Legal experts, white-collar defense lawyers and even some of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers acknowledge that his survival has largely been a function of the fact that he was the president of the United States, a position that gave him great powers to evade legal consequence.“At the outset of the administration I would have said it would be remarkable for someone to run this gauntlet and survive,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former longtime senior Justice Department official.After initially stumbling in its first round of arguments on Tuesday, the latest team — either the seventh or eighth to defend Mr. Trump since he became president, depending on your math — followed the playbook Mr. Trump has long wanted his lawyers to adhere to.They channeled his grievances and aggressively spun, making what-about arguments that tried to cast his own behavior as not so bad when compared with the other side. Democrats found their performance infuriatingly misleading, but it potentially provided the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate opposed to convicting Mr. Trump with talking points they can use to justify their votes.“Hypocrisy,” one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Michael T. van der Veen, said after they played a several-minutes-long clip of prominent Democrats and media commentators using language like “fight” in an effort to show that Mr. Trump’s own words before the riot could have had no role in inciting the violence.David I. Schoen and the rest of Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team followed the playbook that the former president has long wanted his lawyers to adhere to.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“The reality is, Mr. Trump was not in any way, shape or form instructing these people to fight or to use physical violence,” Mr. van der Veen said. “What he was instructing them to do was to challenge their opponents in primary elections to push for sweeping election reforms, to hold big tech responsible.”Serving as one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers is a true high-wire act for a range of reasons, from his indifference to the law and norms to his long-held belief that he is his own best defender and spokesman. In the 1970s, under the tutelage of the lawyer Roy M. Cohn — whose aggressiveness was matched by his lack of adherence to ethical standards — Mr. Trump began conflating legal and public relations problems.These factors have often led Mr. Trump to ignore legal advice and dictate to the lawyers what he wants them to do. Some lawyers have survived for years with Mr. Trump through various investigations, such as Jay Sekulow and the Florida-based couple Marty and Jane Raskin. They were involved in defending Mr. Trump in his first impeachment battle. And they had successes defending Mr. Trump in the highest-profile investigation he faced as president, the special counsel inquiry into possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign in 2016 and Russian officials.But those lawyers are not part of his current team.Neither is Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel who spent weeks at the end of the Trump term batting away various efforts to overturn the election results. As he did with a previous White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump repeatedly wanted the White House counsels to act as his personal lawyers.And Mr. Trump’s willingness to listen to lawyers who tell him what he does not want to hear dwindled significantly after the Nov. 3 election. Instead, he relied on Mr. Giuliani, whom other Trump aides blame for ensnaring Mr. Trump in his two impeachment battles, to guide him in his effort to overturn the results of the election.Mr. Giuliani repeatedly told associates that he would be involved in the impeachment defense, despite his status as a potential witness, since he addressed the Trump rally crowd on Jan. 6. Mr. Trump ultimately told Mr. Giuliani that he would not be involved.But Mr. Trump’s advisers struggled to find a legal team that would defend him.Finally, with help from an ally, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mr. Trump’s advisers announced that he had hired Butch Bowers, a well-known lawyer with experience representing South Carolina politicians facing crises.But just over a week before the trial was to begin, Mr. Bowers and the four lawyers connected to him abruptly left, though another lawyer, David I. Schoen, who was expected from the beginning to be part of the team, remained on board.In another reminder of his ad hoc approach, Mr. Trump asked associates on Thursday night whether it was too late to add or remove lawyers from the team, as Mr. Schoen briefly told the team he was quitting over a debate about how to use the video clips the defense showed on Friday. Mr. Trump called Mr. Schoen and he agreed to rejoin the team, two people briefed on the events said.Just a few hours before Mr. Trump’s team was to appear in the well of the Senate, the group was still hashing out the order of appearance of his two chief lawyers, Mr. Schoen and Bruce L. Castor Jr. In the end, they decided that a third lawyer, Mr. van der Veen, would deliver the opening act.The uncertainty apparently stemmed from Mr. Castor’s widely panned appearance on Tuesday, when he delivered a rambling, unfocused opening statement that enraged his client. Mr. Trump has told advisers and friends he did not want to hear from Mr. Castor anymore, people familiar with the Trump team’s discussions said.People familiar with the makeup of the legal team said that Eric Herschmann, a lawyer and ally of the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who worked in the West Wing in the final year of the administration, was a key figure in putting it together.When Mr. Trump asked Mr. Herschmann who had hired Mr. Castor after his disastrous outing on Tuesday, Mr. Herschmann, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange, sought to lay the blame on Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Mr. Herschmann did not respond to an email seeking comment.By the end of the day Friday, Mr. van der Veen, a personal injury lawyer from Philadelphia, had emerged as Mr. Trump’s primary defender, handling questions from senators, making a series of false and outlandish claims, calling the impeachment a version of “constitutional cancel culture” and declaring that Friday’s proceedings had been his “most miserable” experience in Washington.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead House impeachment manager, responded, “I guess we’re sorry, but man, you should have been here on Jan. 6.”Chris Cameron More