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- Former President Donald Trump does not have a lawyer to represent him on his second indictment, CNN reported.
- Trump’s lack of representation could delay the start of his trial.
- Many lawyers and law firms are distancing themselves from Trump, who made baseless allegations about the election he lost and stoked a crowd of supporters on Jan.6 who sacked the U.S. Capitol.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
The start of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the US Senate could be delayed due to the former president’s lack of legal representation to defend him, CNN reported.
On January 13, the House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump for inciting a violent pro-Trump uprising on January 6 on Capitol Hill. The network said the House could send the articles as early as Friday, but it is unclear when the trial would begin if Trump did not have a defense team.
—Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 21, 2021
The Senate, divided between 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, must now manage a delicate balance of holding hearings and confirmation votes for President Joe Biden’s cabinet candidates while conducting an impeachment trial.
Read more: Joe Biden’s pending cabinet: Tracking candidates for key positions such as Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury and more
A number of prominent conservative lawyers who previously worked for Trump and major law firms are now distancing themselves from the former president over his role in spreading bogus election conspiracy theories and then inciting riot on Capitol Hill, Bloomberg News reported on Jan. 14.
Bloomberg said that many attorneys who represented or assisted Trump in his first trial, including former White House attorney Pat Cipollone, his former personal attorney Jay Sekulow, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi and former Trump chief adviser Eric Herschmann either declined to represent Trump this time around or expressed no interest in doing so.
Law firms such as Porter Wright and Snell & Wilmer have dropped their portrayal of Trump’s campaign in various post-election lawsuits after a public backlash, with the large law firm Jones Day also publicly distancing itself from Trump.
Another prominent conservative lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, resigned from Foley & Lardner after participating in a phone call in which Trump pressured Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to quash the results of the presidential election of the state.
Read more: Trump has not forgiven himself. Here is the massive tsunami of legal peril that awaits him now.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney who has represented the president in some of his trials challenging election results following the Nov. 3 election, said he could not represent the president at his trial because he was qualified as a witness to the events. Giuliani spoke at the pre-insurgency rally in Washington, DC – and called for the “trial by fight”, which he said was later a reference to “Game of Thrones” and not a suggestion to commit violence , as happened in the riot that immediately followed the rally.
Bloomberg said some of the names who could defend Trump include GOP representatives Jim Jordan and Elise Stefanik and controversial Conservative lawyer and law professor John Eastman, who represented Trump in an amicus brief at a trial before the Texas State Supreme Court seeking to overturn and overturn election results in several battlefield states. The court refused to hear the case.
“I think it reflects Trump’s status these days when he has relatively little to offer and people don’t want to be associated with him in general,” said Keith Whittington, professor of political science at the University of Princeton in Bloomberg. “The point is, he won’t get Team A.”
It is not known whether Trump, who left his home in Florida on Wednesday, would return to Washington for trial. Trump himself did not testify in his first impeachment trial, when the Senate acquitted him of two counts of abuse of his office and obstruction of Congress.
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