The committee that’s investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th has reached a kind of “What did Trump know and when did he know it?” point and has issued subpoenas for specific people involved in what happened that day, They’ve also working to get documents from the National Archives, which stores all correspondence in the White House after each president leaves office. There will be more batches of documents in the future.
Trump’s fighting it, of course, saying he’ll invoke executive privilege to stop it. The Biden administration is saying they don’t see any reason to block the documents from being released. I think Trump said this will cause unintended consequences if it goes through, but Trump says anything that he thinks will make himself look good and/or makes it not his fault.
The Donald is revving up his lawyers for lawsuits to prevent it, but he doesn’t exactly have an all-star team any more. Many are inexperienced. Others are the kind of lawyers that you turn to when you’re starting to run out of places that will work with you. There’s been high turnover amongst his legal team.
Several lawyers that represented him in the past are keeping out of his legal battles now. They’re not willing to touch such a toxic person and his repeated claims of voter fraud, even with a “1,000-foot pole”.
This is the point where he needs really good lawyers. Better than Rudy Giuliani, at least, who recently testified under oath that his basis for claiming in lawsuits that there was voting fraud was things he saw on Facebook. Oh, wait. It might have been Instagram. Or could have been Twitter. He doesn’t remember which it was because they all kind of blur together for him. But he does remember that he did not verify if what he read was true because it’s not his job “in a fast-moving case to go out and investigate every piece of evidence”. Finding out if it was true before he used what is effectively hearsay as if it was fact would have made him “a terrible lawyer”.
But whatever his faults, when Trump speaks, Giuliani jumps, even if that means working for The Donald for free. In that same testimony, Rudy says that on either November 4th or 5th in 2020, Trump ordered him to take over the campaign. But he didn’t get paid for it. He only got reimbursed for expenses. It wasn’t long, however, before Rudy starts asking Trump for $20K a day. Or maybe he didn’t. He said later in Nov. 2020 that whoever said that was a liar and the arrangement was “we’ll work it out at the end.”
Oh, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. You do the work for Trump first and then you’ll figure out how to get paid for it afterward? Welcome to the long line of people The Donald has stiffed for decades.
Because of The Donald's long history of not paying, the very lawyers he needs now are staying away from him. Trump denies that he asked four of the lawyers who turned him down. He doesn't know who they are. They're just looking for publicity. Trump says, "I do pay my lawyers when they do a good job."
That’s the key right there: “when they do a good job.” If a lawsuit doesn’t turn out the way he likes, all he has to do is say they didn’t do a good job and he doesn’t have to pay them, in full or at all. It goes hand in hand with him saying before that when he sees a poll he doesn’t like, he just says it’s fake news.
Not paying because they didn’t do a good job is the same excuse he gave in the 2016 presidential debates when Hillary Clinton brought up the fact that Trump didn’t pay several of the contractors he hired to do work for him. These were small businesses that were dependent on being paid to stay in business. Some didn’t when he didn’t.
At the time, Trump defended it by saying that he was allowed to discount what he paid them if they didn’t do a good job. Apparently, some of these contractors did such an absolutely awful job that Trump gave himself large discounts off the bill and causing so much hassle when he was taken to court that the companies settled for a smaller amount.
Any lawyer that is even considering taking Donald Trump as a client should look at getting paid up front. But you know as well as I do that if any of them try it, they’ll be feeling the door on their backside immediately.
