Trump’s lawyers are also on trial

They’ve been accused of orchestrating a criminal conspiracy. They’ve been dubbed ethically compromised. They’ve been labeled liars. They could even be called to testify in the impeachment case they were hired to combat.

In the opening days of Donald Trump’s Senate trial, it has at times felt like the president’s lawyers are his co-defendants.

“Nonsense,” said Jay Sekulow, the longest-serving personal attorney to Trump, when asked about the litany of allegations flying around Capitol Hill.

Welcome to impeachment in the Trump era, where the president cheers on his attorneys as they blow right past any suggestion that they themselves were direct witnesses — if not culpable — in a scheme that helped make their client America’s third chief executive to be impeached.

It’s a theme that has been replayed throughout Trump’s life: The lawyers he brings in to authorize and defend his behavior end up in their own legal morass. Trump’s longtime legal fixer, Michael Cohen, is doing three years in federal prison for his election-season role in paying off women who alleged affairs with Trump. Former White House counsel Don McGahn ended up as a star witness for special counsel Robert Mueller after he had a front-row seat to Trump’s potential obstruction of justice. Rudy Giuliani has hired a team of criminal defense attorneys as the Justice Department investigates his recent behavior while serving as personal counsel to the president.

For now, Trump’s current attorneys appear to be embracing their role as supporting actors in a drama that will play out on the Senate floor for another week if not longer, sparring frequently with their Democratic investigators and leaving Chief Justice John Roberts to decide just how many more times he’ll need to serve as the chief of the Senate’s decorum police.

The complaints have dominated the early days of the trial.

Even before opening arguments, House Democrats warned White House counsel Pat Cipollone that they have evidence showing he’s a material witness in their impeachment case and that he should consider removing himself from the president’s defense team for ethical reasons or risk “seriously damaging the fairness of the trial.”

Cipollone made no such move. And by the end of the trial’s first day, a marathon debate that stretched into early Wednesday morning, the House Democrats prosecuting Trump had accused Cipollone and Sekulow of fudging facts to present a more sympathetic version of the Ukraine scandal that threatens to upend Trump’s presidency and his political future.

“The president’s counsel has no standing to talk about lying,” complained Rep. Jerry Nadler, the Judiciary Committee chairman whose exchange with the two Trump lawyers quickly spiraled downward and prompted Roberts to admonish all sides “in equal terms to remember they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Democrats also haven’t spared Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has been sidelined from formally participating in the Senate proceedings but remains a vocal member of the president’s defense team.

On Wednesday, House impeachment prosecutors name-dropped Giuliani more than 200 times during their opening presentations on the Senate floor. That was on top of nearly 60 mentions Tuesday as the Democratic lawmakers discussed the president’s efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into Trump’s political opponent, Joe Biden. And that’s in addition to 91 Giuliani references in the opening brief that the House filed last weekend.

Trump is facing allegations that he withheld foreign aid to Ukraine and an official White House visit for the country’s president as leverage in a Giuliani-fueled attempt to get Ukraine to announce investigations into Biden and his son Hunter. Democrats also impeached Trump over his refusal to cooperate with their Ukraine investigation.

As usual, Trump doesn’t appear fazed by the mounting criticism of his lawyers. He called Cipollone “a high-quality human being” during a news conference Wednesday at the conclusion of an international economic summit in Davos, Switzerland.

“I was very impressed with Pat,” the president added of Cipollone, whose arguments on the Senate floor marked the first time he’d said anything in public since taking the White House job in late 2018. “He had great emotion yesterday. Pat is a brilliant guy, but I've never seen that emotion. And that’s real emotion. That’s because he knows this is a hoax. And I was very proud of the job he did.”

As for Giuliani, Trump said he made the decision to keep arguably his most famous lawyer off his official Senate defense “because I don't want there to be a conflict.”

“I’d love to have Rudy on my team,” the president added. “But, you know, he could be a witness at some point, if this whole sham continues.”

The president’s legal team has been anything but consistent in the three years since Trump took office.

Longtime personal attorney Marc Kasowitz lasted only a couple months in 2017 during the early phases of the Russia probe before being pushed out amid frustration over his client’s behavior. Ty Cobb’s efforts in the White House to cooperate with Mueller’s prosecutors drew criticism from Trump allies who doubted the effectiveness of being so open with investigators.

The president famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” while complaining that his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wasn’t doing enough to protect him from the special counsel.

That spirit of Cohn, the infamous former counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who taught Trump many of the hardball tactics he first used in business and now deploys from the White House, looms over the latest armada of attorneys who have stepped up to defend the president with indignant dismissals and swift counterattacks at any suggestion they’ve crossed an ethical line.

Still, fresh allegations continue to emerge that are putting Trump’s lawyers in awkward spots.

Lev Parnas, the Giuliani associate indicted on federal campaign finance violations, told NBC’s Rachel Maddow last week that Sekulow was well aware of Giuliani’s lead role in the Ukraine pressure campaign — even though he said Sekulow “didn’t agree with what Rudy was doing.”

Backing up his claims, Parnas supplied House investigators with an October 2019 email showing Sekulow spoke to the president about having John Dowd, a former Trump lawyer, represent Parnas as congressional investigators sought evidence about the Ukraine scheme.

Trump’s lawyers have swatted away the Parnas revelations, saying they came in too late to be included in the Senate trial’s impeachment record.

“I don’t think he’d have any credibility,” a person working with the president’s legal team told reporters this weekend. “He’s under indictment and obviously trying to curry favor with anyone he can by saying what he can to better enhance his position in a criminal prosecution.”

Cipollone is seen as someone in the middle of several episodes tied to the impeachment probe.

He’s the boss of John Eisenberg, the top White House national security lawyer whom several witnesses have identified as someone with direct knowledge of the president’s Ukraine actions. Cipollone has also signed off on several letters the White House sent to the House rejecting its requests for materials. The refusal to engage later led to a second article of impeachment claiming the president obstructed Congress.

None of that has stopped Cipollone and Sekulow from taking their place in the well of the Senate at the head of a custom-built table dating to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Trump’s political operation is also giving the lawyers plenty of air cover.

On the White House’s official Twitter feed, a post Tuesday featured a clip of Sekulow’s first salvos against the Democrats. Eric Trump sent his own “great job” tweet to Sekulow and Cipollone, punctuated with three American flag emojis. Giuliani, meantime, praised the president’s Senate trial team during an interview on former White House senior adviser Stephen Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

Despite the awkward connections back to the president’s impeachment case, Trump’s lawyers should not be disqualified from representing the president in his Senate trial, said Jane Sherburne, a former Bill Clinton White House attorney. Sherburne recently got the call from Congress to testify about her work helping the previous impeached president navigate both independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigation and multiple Capitol Hill probes.

“That would be an absurd result as lawyers are always in possession of sensitive and privileged information from and about their clients, including White House counsel,” she said. Trump’s attorneys, she noted, have made it “quite clear” they won’t be cooperating with investigators.

“It may make for a bit of drama,” she added, “but it is unlikely to produce anything useful for the prosecution.”