So a law firm taking months to get up to speed (and increase billing) is unfair to our great country, meaning Trump?
So, he wants them to take less time to research his case and to charge less. Fine with me. He can get sodomized in court like Kasich for not having his ducks in a row. He either thinks association with the Trump brand is equivalent to currency, or he’s running out of legal funds.
I thought GWB was naive, but he’s Confucius compared to Trump.
He’s really amping up the reason for the apeal -
I can see making that claim if you are assigned a public defender who is not interested in your case.
Harder to justify when you have hired your own legal team.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But in fact public defenders are often far better acquainted with the judges and the legal system they inhabit than the highly paid criminal attorneys a defendant may hire, because the public defenders work in that system every single day. They try cases very regularly.
Private attorneys are as vulnerable to ineffective assistance of counsel appeals than public defenders – and in my experience, actually more likely to cause this issue on appeal.
I hasten to add this is entirely dependent on the experience of the private attorney. I know many fine private criminal defense lawyers.
In Trump’s case, I think he’ll probably have this issue on appeal available to him irrespective of which attorney he uses to defend in the Mueller investigation. They’re all crap.
Some times very, very regularly, as in being terribly overloaded.
Absolutely true, but they can also assess cases pretty quickly. I’m not saying they never make mistakes. Their clients often feel they should receive a lot more hand-holding than they get, though. Doesn’t mean they didn’t receive adequate representation.
My point is that Trump will always find an excuse for his apparent losses - and he lays the groundwork for it from the very beginning.
“its rigged” - “illegal voters”
He does do that.
Courts have some prophylactic measures they can take, though. They might appoint an attorney as co-counsel with particular expertise, even if the defendant doesn’t want the additional help. This is obviously not a common practice (except in death penalty cases, where lawyers must have expertise in trying those cases), but what could the defendant do? Object that he’s getting too much good help with his case?
If the way out was to simply hire incompetent counsel, all defendants would do it.
And we can probably agree that he’ll claim “it’s rigged,” no matter how fairly he’s treated.
From his point of view, being treated fairly means it IS rigged against him, since the only way he’d win would be if he could rig it the other way.
Hiring them isn’t hard. Keeping them, OTOH…
That’s part of his problem. But beyond that, he has other problems in this regard.
For an ordinary president, the prestige of being the president’s lawyer is such that it would be financially worthwhile for many lawyers to take the job even if they knew they weren’t being paid, because the reflected glory would pay for itself in the form of increased billings from other clients. In the case of Trump, his deficiencies as a client - and as a person - are very well known, and being “Trump’s lawyer” is much much less of a prestigious position. To the point where when you balance that against the difficulties of dealing with Trump as a client, it’s going to be very much a net negative for most top quality lawyers.
It will always be someone else’s fault. It’s never his fault.
That is the story of his life.
Except that his own legal team is (largely) fuckin’ Jay Sekulow. I’ve known his name for years, he was the lawyer always opposing the ACLU in court.
I would really love to see Trump add Mat Staver to his team. That would be delightful.
Chris Hayes made a joke about him going pro se on twitter and that visualization… it haunts me.
“Your honor, crooked Hillary, no collusion, the best people, believe me.”
I mean, at some level there’s going to be some ambulance chaser who’d take him on, right? But it’s conceivable that he won’t be able to find a competent, prestigious attorney without a conflict that is willing and/or able to take him on. And whatever firm he retains… can he keep them if he doesn’t pay them? Would this be the service he’d cough up for? Does he get a bulk discount for a divorce attorney? Not that either of them have filed or given any indication that they would file, but if I’m him I’m getting someone to check on my pre-nup.
From an article in the Independent:
Yup. He takes all of the credit - even for things that he had no part in (“I invented the word ‘fake’.”) - but it’s always someone else’s fault for the things that don’t go his way. The judge is Mexican, illegal voters made him lose the popular vote, the party that doesn’t control any branch of government is full of big ol’ meanie-heads, and so on, ad infinitum.
What appeal? It’s unlikely that Trump would be indicted as a sitting president. If he were, then the constitutional pandora’s box of a president facing prosecution from a department he is in charge of would bog down any court to such an extent that even an ineffective defense attorney would be able to make hay.
It is much more likely Trump will be impeached than indicted. And, after being tried by the Senate should the House successfully vote to impeach (in 2019, one imagines if the Democrats take the House), then there is no court that could hear any post-removal appeal.
Two more attorneys have declined to represent Trump in the Mueller probe, citing unspecified “business conflicts”. They say that representing the president would be a great honor, and they’d really love to, but darn those pesky business conflicts. They go on to say that Trump has great representation in Cobb and Sekulow.
I’m smiling.
So is Robert Mueller.
“We have to close an arms deal in Tanzania or pick up some copra on Guam or something.”
— Spam Gangree to Goddam, Bored of the Rings