Government

Quitfired Trump Lawyer Tim Parlatore Says Trump Is Innocent Victim Of His Bad Advisors

Meanwhile on Truth Social ...

By  
on

Trump’s lawyers are a catty bunch, constantly sniping at each other to any journalist who will return a text message. But most of that snarking takes place off the record, with the former president’s rotating stable of esquires whinnying in reporters’ ears that Alina Habba is incompetent, Joseph Tacopina is a “loudmouth,” and Evan Corcoran is to blame for this whole mess because he didn’t check hard enough for classified documents in the infamous pool locker.

But this CNN interview with recently quitfired attorney Timothy Parlatore is some next level sh*t.

“There are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be,” Parlatore told CNN’s Paula Reid on Saturday. “In particular, there is one individual who works for him, Boris Epshteyn, who had really done everything he could to try to block us, to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.”

“He served as kind of a filter to prevent us from getting information to the client to prevent us from getting information from the client,” Parlatore went on. “In my opinion, he was not very honest with us or with the client on certain things.”

This confirms reporting by the  New York Times suggesting that Epshteyn’s “penchant for delivering sunny news to Mr. Trump despite bad circumstances, and for creating a bottleneck for the lawyers in dealing with the client” contributed to Parlatore’s abrupt departure last week.

“It’s difficult enough fighting against DOJ and in this case special counsel,” Parlatore continued on CNN, without someone on your own team “trying to undermine you and really make it so that I can’t do what I know that I need to do as a lawyer.”

Sponsored

Parlatore accused Epshteyn of interfering with the searches of Trump’s other properties for government documents, confirming prior reports that Trump’s fixer had effectively sidelined former Florida Solicitor General Chris Kise, who was wooed away from Foley & Lardner last fall with a $3 million retainer paid by  Save America PAC. According to the Washington Post, Kise advised Trump to “turn down the temperature with the Justice Department,” in an attempt to head off criminal prosecution by returning all the documents back and pinky swearing to the DOJ that there’d been no leakage. But Epshteyn, who recently had his phone seized by the FBI, is facing multiple investigations over electoral interference in both DC and Atlanta, regularly discussed the fake electors plot via email, and has been subpoenaed by multiple grand juries, said no.

This jibes with gossip that Epshteyn egged Trump on to some of the craziest Trump clownsuits, including the one against the Pulitzer board for defamatory refusal to revoke a prize and against New York Attorney General Letitia James for prosecuting while biased — both of which were filed in Florida state court.

“Boris is a lawyer,” Parlatore went on. “He spent about 18 months at a big firm doing transactional work, and I think he just thinks that, based on that experience, he knows better than all of us.”

MEE-OWWW.

Parlatore’s departure takes place during what appears to be a crucial moment in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury investigation of Trump’s retention of classified documents. This morning, Hugo Lowell at The Guardian reported that, when Judge Beryl Howell abrogated attorney-client privilege with respect to attorney Evan Corcoran’s communications with Trump, she made him cough up some 50 pages of notes to prosecutors. Those notes show Corcoran telling Trump that he had no legal grounds to retain government documents after receiving a subpoena — something which might bolster mens rea in the event Trump is ever charged.

Sponsored

Corcoran, who testified again to the grand jury before withdrawing his representation in the documents case, drafted the declaration signed by Christina Bobb in June of 2022 attesting that, to the best of her knowledge, Mar-a-Lago had been searched and no further classified documents remained. She described herself as the custodian of records in this document, and has, indeed, testified to the grand jury. And so it is rather odd that Parlatore told Reid that his own testimony before the grand jury was not in his role as counsel, but as custodian of records.

The DOJ wanted a custodian of records to appear to “talk about what searches were done so they could beat him up,” he said, but “ultimately there wasn’t really a good person on the staff to send, so I made the decision to go in myself.”

He then went on to boast that he’d told the grand jurors some information that prosecutors didn’t like, and his offers to return had been refused. It was rather reminiscent of comments by Robert Costello after testifying to the grand jury empaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that Michael Cohen, who preceded Epshteyn in the lawyer/fixer role, was not to be trusted — although Epshteyn, unlike Cohen, hasn’t yet flipped and gotten himself excommunicated.

“They’d ask me a limited question based on these six emails, and I would volunteer information that I thought the grand jury needed to hear,” he said on the courthouse steps of his onetime client, adding later, “I told the grand jury that this guy couldn’t tell the truth if you put a gun to his head.”

And just three weeks later, Trump was indicted on 34 false business records counts. But good luck pinning all the federal charges on Epshteyn and leaving sainted Donald Trump free to skate away again!

Trump was warned about retaining classified documents, notes reveal [Guardian]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

, , , ,