In what can only be called clown shit, President Trump will enter his Senate impeachment trial with former Bill Clinton special prosecutors Kenneth Starr and Robert Ray, plus retired Harvard constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz, as his attorneys.
According to Politico, the three famous attorneys will serve as backups behind “White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, Trump’s longtime personal attorney.”
Dershowitz, longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein, has forever been a defender of wealthy deplorable white men. When he’s not doing whatever it is that rich white lawyers do when they aren’t lawyering, Dershowitz can be found making the rounds on conservative cable news programs defending President Trump. Politico notes that Dershowitz has publicly questioned Democrats’ strategy during the impeachment proceedings and has even speculated that Trump could take the articles of impeachment to the Supreme Court and have them tossed on constitutional grounds.
It’s known that Trump generally loves people who love him just as much as he loves himself, which means that Starr and Ray—both defenders of Trump—were obvious choices for his legal team. Starr hasn’t always been a Trump favorite; in fact, in a 1999 interview back when Trump was just a regular criminal and not a presidential one, Trump called Starr a “lunatic” and a “disaster.”
Starr has made himself available to the president by sending out cryptic messages during his public appearances.
“If I’m on his criminal defense team, I would be very concerned,” Starr told Politico’s Off Message podcast in a September 2018 interview surrounding Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. “I don’t know what President Trump knows, but there have been a number of guilty pleas. Some of those guilty pleas go to false statements, so I would just be cautious” before speaking with special counsel Robert Mueller, Politico reports.
From Politico:
Trump’s floor team will also include Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who joined the White House as an adviser on impeachment last year, and Jane Raskin, a personal attorney for the president and former federal prosecutor who had a lead role in defending Trump in the Mueller probe.
Trump’s impeachment legal strategy has taken shape under Cipollone, who replaced Don McGahn as White House counsel in late 2018. The 53-year old longtime corporate litigator worked under Attorney General William Barr during his first stint at the Justice Department in the George H.W. Bush administration. Cipollone entered Trump’s orbit during the 2016 presidential campaign via an introduction from conservative commentator and longtime friend Laura Ingraham and later helped prep the then-GOP nominee for his debates with Hillary Clinton.
Politico notes that there will be some 20 attorneys specifically assigned to oversight issues that are the basis for the impeachment proceedings.
Trump isn’t going to be impeached as the Republican-led Senate moves to his drum, and Jeffrey Epstein avoided prosecution for years. Who were Epstein’s lawyer friends during those years? Oh, just Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz.