With his impeachment trial starting in just over a week, former President Donald Trump is struggling to keep attorneys in his corner, as his lead lawyer and four others said to be handling the case have reportedly left his defense team. Butch Bowers, the lead attorney who put together the team, will no longer represent the former president, nor will Deborah Barbier, a criminal defense lawyer in South Carolina and former longtime federal prosecutor, CNN reports. Along with Bowers and Barbier—whose departures were said to be “a mutual decision for both,” according to CNN—two other well-established lawyers from South Carolina and a third from North Carolina have also reportedly jumped ship. Former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller told CNN the former president and his aides had “not made a decision on our legal team,” even as Trump is due to submit a response by Tuesday to the House’s article of impeachment for inciting the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
The dramatic exit of Trump’s legal team follows reported disputes over his defense strategy, as the president “wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office,” according to CNN. Republican lawmakers have rallied behind the question of constitutionality—all but five GOP senators voted to challenge the legality of a post-presidency trial last week, previewing Trump’s likely acquittal in a show of support said to be encouraging to Trump advisers. But as the New York Times reports, Trump had urged those handling his impeachment defense to focus on his baseless stolen election claim and insisted the case is “simple”; while aides say he is not seriously considering doing so, Trump “has told advisers he could argue it himself and save the money on lawyers,” according to the Times.
For months, Trump fed supporters lies about mass election fraud, a fallacy that emboldened a violent mob to storm the Capitol. Now, ahead of the impeachment trial, the former president remains committed to his fiction—seemingly at the expense of legal representation. As the Times notes, Bowers was the only member of Trump’s defense who Trump advisers had confirmed would defend the former president, an arrangement South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham reportedly helped facilitate after “weeks of frantic searching.” The renewed scramble for reputable lawyers willing to take the case recalls the struggle Trump had during his post-election litigation blitz, as law firms where Trump was a long-term client decided they didn’t want to help the then-president undermine the election results. Trump then tapped his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to helm his campaign’s remaining legal options, joined by attorney Sidney Powell, whose conspiracy peddling was said, at times, to be even too outlandish even for Trump.
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