They have a previous engagement
Poor Don. Yet another will you come to my party? will you be my lawyer? meets with a Sorry, no.
Two more high-power attorneys have had to turn down President Donald Trump. Tom Buchanan and Dan Webb confirmed to The Daily Beast that Trump reached out to them about representing him, and that they couldn’t do it.
“President Trump reached out to Dan Webb and Tom Buchanan to provide legal representation,” they said in a statement. “They were unable to take on the representation due to business conflicts. However they consider the opportunity to represent the President to be the highest honor and they sincerely regret that they cannot do so. They wish the president the best and believe he has excellent representation in Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow.”
Do they really though? Maybe they do, but I don’t. It depends on who it is. It’s kind of pathetic what a lot of duds have been president over the past few decades. You’d think the job would attract really talented people but it doesn’t seem to.
Buchanan and Webb’s decision highlights the challenges the president has faced in assembling a legal team to represent him for matters related to the Mueller probe. Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that numerous lawyers were eager to work for him. But so far, his team has been shrinking rather than expanding.
If they’re so eager, where are they?
Let’s have another little hit of Fire and Fury.
Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best the most incredible, the ne plus ultra, the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron door. [p 35]
Lawyers probably don’t want to deal with On or Off.
Can you blame them? When the electorate doesn’t seem to want really talented people, but instead prefer people they want to have a beer with?
iknklast, nobody wants to have a beer with the pub bore, especially one who never buys a round.
I’m sure there are lots of lawyers who want to represent Trump. Whether they’re good, or even competent, might be another question. Many will want to use the opportunity as self promotion, whereas Trump really needs experienced talent the equivalent of those on the Investigation team.
Frankly, I just want him to go into an interview cold with no prep.
It’s not about blaming though, it’s just not understanding. The US is ideologically deeply committed to meritocracy, for ill as well as good, yet it has a terribly hard time throwing up meritorious chief executives.
AoS – the problem is, a lot of his supporters don’t recognize that he is the pub bore. They think he’s brilliant – a stable genius, in fact. Some of my educated friends tell me how much they love the Donald. Why? I have no clue. I think our school systems have failed them.
Iknklast: how are these individuals still your friends?
Well, technically they are now mostly just colleagues. We can choose our friends, but we can’t always choose our colleagues, and we learn things we are sometimes better off not knowing (or maybe we are better off knowing, so we don’t hang around with them any more).
Do we know if he’s asked Matt Staver or Larry Klayman, yet? I’m sure they’d take the gig.
Rob – given that Trump seems constitutionally incapable of taking advice he doesn’t like or listening to anyone who knows more about something than he does (which is in his mind impossible), I think you may get your wish. Despite the best efforts if his lawyers.
It does attract them; the problem is that the electorate does not elect people on the basis of talent. The primaries deliver candidates based on their appeal to especially partisan voters, and the general election delivers them on the basis of possibly narrow margins of appeal to swing state voters.
The framers of the Constitution did what they could to get an effective central government going in spite of a lot of resistance by diverse interests with no regard for democracy. We’ve lurched toward more and broader participation since then, along with a stronger central government, but it’s been a matter of what reforms have been possible as they have been without any thorough revision in light of current standards. And just because the founders did a pretty good job by late 18th century standards, there’s popular, patriotic reluctance to seeing the work as a starting point instead of as some sacred, eternal verity. (And naturally, it’s a reluctance cynically used by those who do benefit from it.)
“Frankly, I just want him to go into an interview cold with no prep.”
That’s my wish , too.
There must be a titanic struggle in his tiny, little mind between that even smaller (possibly nonexistant) part urging the path of caution and self-preservation through following the advice and counsel of others and the impetuous, know-nothing know-it-all id that eschews knowledge and experience outside of his own and propels him past intelligence analysis and presidential daily briefings to do things in his own inimitably ham-handed, disastrous way. Though somewhere in the depths of his limbic system, he must realize, at some level, that the Mueller interview is infinitely riskier and more dangerous to his own ego’s interests than Russian election diddling or nuclear war on the Korean penninsula.
A good point in this Talking Points Memo post that I haven’t seen made. In addition to the refusal to take advice, the history of nonpayment, and the general public relations risk of joining Team Trump, there are some ethical concerns unique to this situation.
In a nutshell: generally speaking, there’s no ethical problem with representing a client who is guilty of past crimes. (Make your lawyer jokes here. I’ll wait.) But a client who is party to an ongoing course of criminal conduct is a different kettle of fish, particularly if he’s dragging you in to assist in, say, obstruction of justice. And considering that Trump’s idea of a good lawyer is Roy Cohen or Michael Cohen, you’re damn right he expects your assistance in whatever dirty deeds he’s contemplating.