The Devil's Advocates

 

     After all these years, I think we can safely come to the conclusion that Donald Trump's greatest super power is in turning once respected attorneys into bed-shitting assclowns who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a courtroom or even a law degree.

      It's as if half of them got their law degrees in a Rotary Club raffle or out of a Piggly Wiggly vending machine. The haul in Fulton County, Georgia alone was legion. There was Kenneth Chesebro, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell. All four were arrested and formally indicted on suspicion of trying to overturn the election results in Georgia.

     Then there's John Eastman, formerly an esteemed law professor, who'd been disbarred in the state of California. Giuliani, again, has already had his law license suspended in New York and Washington, DC. Lin Wood voluntarily surrendered his own law license. And, for a while, Sidney Powell wasn't too far behind until she was bailed out by right wing judges in Texas.

     Those chess pieces have been toppled and are rolling around on the board. Among the walking wounded are Chris Kise, former Florida Solicitor General, Alina Habba and Todd Blanche. Two of those last three had reputations as fine attorneys in their own right until they chose to become literally the Devil's advocate and become marionettes for Donald Trump, the world's most incompetent puppet master. To their credit, Evan Corcoran and Joe Tacopina got out while the getting was good. And that doesn't include all the law firms that have quit working for Trump just in the past year.

     To be fair to them, they're working for someone who's simply the world's worst client. Imagine your house is on fire and as the firemen are carrying you out, you keep setting fires on your way out the door. That's what it's like if you're a lawyer and have Donald Trump as a client. To quote Gilbert and Sullivan, their lot is not a happy one.

     Take Michael Cohen's cross examination, for instance. Over the course of three days, they feinted, lunged and parried and didn't land a significant touché on Trump's former lawyer and fixer. They seemed to have caught him in a minor inconsistency regarding a 14 year-old's prank phone call that was over a decade ago. The only other way they had laid a glove on him was when they got him to admit that he'd stolen $30,000 from the Trump Organization.

     You can't expect the jurors to care about that considering Trump's haul from his time in New York and Washington, in which his tax evasion would've made Al Capone blush. 

     But the main takeaway from the cross examination, in which the defense had a great opportunity to destroy Cohen's credibility as a witness for the prosecution, was that they didn't hammer away at that admission. They chose, instead, to go after Cohen because he couldn't remember all the facts about a phone call from a crank caller that happened well over a decade ago.

     Michael Cohen's about as flawed a witness as a DA's office could find. He went to prison for three years, albeit for doing Trump's bidding, committed tax fraud and eventually got disbarred. He came close to violating the gag order by refusing to shut up about the case. And it's obvious that Cohen's Come to Jesus Moment is mostly if not completely predicated on revenge on Trump for not giving him a job in the administration. Cohen is the very definition of sour grapes.

     Granted, Cohen still knows where the bodies are figuratively buried and, whatever his motives for coming clean and positioning himself as the reformed heel, it doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's talking about. However, a first year law student wouldn't have let Cohen off the hook after he volunteered that he overbilled the Trump Org $30,000.

     There's no explaining that.

     Until he was slapped with Justice Merchan's gag order, there was no stopping Trump from attacking Cohen and every witness who'd testified against him in the hush money trial. Instead, he launched a pathetic army of surrogates to do his dirty work for him, even going as far as to write and edit their talking points for them in open view of reporters.

     And then there was Robert Costello, whose own appearance on the witness stand was even more inexplicable. Costello was obviously there at Trump's insistence because he knew he'd act as a bomb thrower and not the credible witness he desperately needed. Costello's behavior on the stand was so outrageous that Justice Merchan had to clear the courtroom so he could yell at Costello.

     So, his attorneys' inability or unwillingness to kick Cohen when he was down defies explanation.

     But Trump's life since he began his political career in 2015 has turned into a meat grinder for the lives of the people who've been convicted, thrown in prison, and been sanctioned and disbarred for carrying his rancid water. He has this superhuman ability to attract once-respected attorneys and when they're extruded out the other end, they've been turned into ambulance chasers.

     Just based on these observations, it's easy to see how Trump's subversion of his attorneys' efforts and insistence on controlling everything will absolutely result in any number of guilty verdicts in this and his other three criminal cases. That is, if the right wingers who've hijacked those other three cases allow them to go to trial before Election Day, which is looking less and less likely.