Donald Trump has been in steady litigation for the greater part of his career, and it’s fairly clear he’s the consummate nightmare client: stiffing lawyers, apparently pressuring them to break legal and ethical rules, and gleefully ignoring their advice. There was that time his lawyers told him to refrain from tweeting about the then ongoing Robert Mueller investigation only to have him do it “before they got to the end of the West Wing driveway,” The Washington Post reported. As the legal fallout from the January 6 insurrection started to put a number of Trump lawyers in legal jeopardy of their own, some of them began joking that MAGA actually stood for “making attorneys get attorneys.” Even Trump told Sean Hannity this March: “I say sometimes to a lawyer, ‘Are you sure you want to represent me? I think you’re making a mistake.’”
And so it was no surprise that Trump has reportedly struggled to assemble a legal team as his court proceedings begin in Florida, with many major Florida attorneys refusing to take him on. Two of Trump’s lawyers, John Rowley and Jim Trusty, quit just a day after the federal indictment came down, following in the footsteps of Timothy Parlatore, who resigned in May. “The problem is none of us want to work for the guy,” one top federal criminal defense attorney in the Southern District of Florida told The Messenger. Said another: “My wife would divorce me and my kids wouldn’t talk to me if I defended Trump.”
Trump’s tarnished reputation seems to have limited his options for representation. In Florida, he’s been represented by Lindsey Halligan, whose prior legal practice largely focused on residential and commercial insurance issues. As of last August, a search of federal court records conducted by The Washington Post returned zero hits of her name. In New York, he’s being represented by Alina Habba, a partner at a tiny law firm headquartered just a few miles from Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course, whose qualifications prior to working for Trump included a stint as general counsel for a parking garage company. And coordinating much of Trump’s sprawling legal defense efforts is Boris Epshteyn, a Soviet-born investment banker, lawyer, and unflinching Trump toady with no experience in criminal defense. Some people in Trumpworld are blaming Epshteyn for the Trump legal team’s dysfunction. “Boris pissed off all the Florida lawyers. People are dropping like flies. Everybody hates him. He’s a toxic loser. He’s a complete psycho,” one member of Trump’s legal team told the Daily Beast. “He’s got daddy issues, and Trump is his daddy.”
At his arraignment on Tuesday, Trump appeared with two slightly more buttoned-up figures—Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor general, and Todd Blanche, a former federal prosecutor with experience in white-collar defense—though neither has any expertise in national security cases. Trump, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman wrote last week, is still “searching to find a vicious lawyer in the mold of his mentor Roy Cohn.”
As Trump’s current legal woes escalate, we’ve assembled a rogues’ gallery of some of the lawyers who hopped on and off Trump’s legal carousel in the over three years since his first impeachment trial, and whose legal work for the now federally indicted former president landed them in hot water:
Christina Bobb
A former marine smarting from a calamitous 2014 run for Congress in California, Bobb joined the Donald Trump administration early on, first as a law clerk in the White House Office for National Drug Control Policy, then for stints at the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection. She was reportedly considered to be “mega MAGA” by other DHS officials, who (foreshadowing!) worried whether she could be trusted with classified information. Bobb pivoted in June 2020, becoming an on-air anchor for far-right One America News Network, where she obsequiously covered the White House and reliably churned out election lies. She was in the Trump “war room” at the Willard InterContinental hotel with fake-elector mastermind John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and others on the morning of January 6. Bobb then joined the Trump team officially in March 2022. Soon after, she signed a sworn statement attesting that, to the best of her knowledge, Trump’s legal team had conducted a “diligent search” of his Mar-a-Lago compound and had returned classified documents. Bobb was at Mar-a-Lago during the FBI raid in August 2022 which proved her sworn statement to be false. (Bobb later complained privately that she didn’t fully understand what she was signing.) According to her Twitter bio, she is still an attorney for the Trump 2024 campaign.
John Eastman
A former law professor and once high-ranking member of the archconservative Federalist Society, Eastman provided the “brains”—such as they were—for Trump’s crackpot plan to pressure Mike Pence to block the election-certification process, a scheme Eastman privately admitted was unlawful. On January 6, Eastman spoke next to Giuliani at the rally at the Ellipse, and afterward reportedly sought a pardon, emailing Giuliani, “I’ve decided I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.” (The list never came to fruition.) Though Eastman retired from his academic post at Chapman University soon after the Capitol riot and no longer chairs a major Federalist Society practice group, he remains firmly ensconced at the California-based Claremont Institute, an ultra-MAGA think tank. After the insurrection, White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told Eastman to “get a great f–king criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.” In California, he is going to trial in front of the State Bar Court, which could strip him of his law license. He’s also a likely target in Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into Trump’s fake-elector plot in Georgia.
Cleta Mitchell
Mitchell is one of just a handful of former Trump election lawyers who can be said to have landed on her feet, if by landed on her feet you mean continued her unrelenting assault on the right to vote. Though she resigned from her law firm after news broke that she had been on Trump’s infamous vote-finding call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, she chalked up her ouster to “leftist groups via social media” and quickly hopped on the right-wing gravy train.