Trump’s Second E. Jean Trial Will Be a Dry Run for His Criminal Trials

As our attention remains fixed on the multiple criminal matters that could force Donald Trump to live out his life in an orange jumpsuit, his mounting civil problems might appear relatively insignificant. Yet, the related Trump civil matters can provide lessons and road maps for the crucial criminal legal battles to come.

Tuesday’s start of the second E. Jean Carroll civil trial promises to be the latest, and perhaps most significant, example.

After having initially failed to prevent a $5 million verdict against the former president for physical abuse, Team Trump returns to Judge Lewis Kaplan’s courtroom in New York to defend the former president against claims he owes Carroll an additional $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages for false statements he made about her.

A lot has happened since the first trial. Lead lawyer Joseph Tacopina will, unsurprisingly, no longer represent Trump. That leaves Alina Habba and Chris Kise at the helm, unless and until someone else can be added at the last minute.

There is little need to repeat the many limitations of Habba’s skill set; I detailed them months ago, describing an attorney devoid of both academic credentials and courtroom experience. Remarkably, despite her initial representation of the former president—a civil suit she filed in Florida against Trump’s perceived political enemies that was quickly dismissed, with the judge issuing a nearly $1 million judgment against Habba and her client for filing a baseless claim—Habba remains a prominent player in his defense team.

Predictably, since that remarkable debut, the former general counsel to a parking garage company further underperformed in her defense of the former president in the recently completed lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general seeking millions of dollars from Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization for the filing of false financial statements. The presiding judge, Arthur Engoron, will likely soon impose the strongest financial penalties he can justify, potentially bringing financial ruin to the Trump family.

Kise was also a principal Trump attorney in the matter before Engoron and, while not quite as ineffectual, nonetheless completely failed to minimize his client’s legal risk. In short, Kise’s performance only underscored the recent observation made by Tim Parlatore, his prior co-counsel for Trump, that Kise is “not a trial lawyer.”

Central to the defense’s self-immolation was smearing Engoron, his law clerk, and the attorney general with baseless, outrageous claims of bias. Were that not sufficiently beyond the pale, their client then took the helm of the sinking ship and plunged it farther into the rocks by repeating the same lies directly to the judge.

All of which brings us back to the potential significance of the E. Jean Carroll proceedings before Kaplan.

Taking full advantage of the chaos Team Trump created in the attorney general’s case, especially with the threat that Trump will appear at the Carroll trial in person or as a witness, Carroll’s counsel filed motions with Kaplan asking him to put in place orders limiting what Team Trump can say at trial. The requests were made to prevent defense counsel and/or their client from trying to “poison these proceedings” and intentionally turning the trial “into a circus.”

Kaplan has thus far imposed limitations principally on Team Trump’s ability to deny physically attacking Carroll, as that factual issue had already been determined in the first trial.

More significant limitations on the horizon could address Carroll’s all-too-reasonable fears of defense attempts to “poison the proceedings” and create a “circus”—a danger also looming over the 2020 election interference criminal case scheduled in D.C. for trial this spring (proceedings currently on hold while the D.C. Circuit considers an appeal). Not surprisingly, special counsel Jack Smith has also filed a similar pretrial motion with Judge Tanya Chutkan to not allow the defendant “to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation.”

While more can and should be expected of the personal integrity and skill level of Trump’s lead counsel in the D.C. case, Todd Blanche and John Lauro—both with real experience and credentials as former federal prosecutors—given the disappointing to downright astoundingly unacceptable performances of other Trump attorneys with actual bona fides, as I have previously warned, in Trump World nothing is certain. Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani is Exhibit A of that reality.

And so how far Kaplan will go to control courtroom behavior in the New York civil case will be a testing ground for the limitations that can be imposed by Chutkan in what promises to be the most significant criminal trial in history.

In this regard, Kaplan is surely the right judge to test the outer limits of such limitations. As I noted in commenting on the first Carroll trial, the highly respected Kaplan is known by attorneys in New York to run his courtroom as a tight, well-controlled ship and is willing to take disciplinary actions few of his peers would even contemplate in order to protect his authority.

Trump and his lawyers are surely aware not only of whom they are dealing in the person of Kaplan, but of the potential impact his rulings can have on Chutkan and a trial in D.C. that could finally bring meaningful justice to someone who has avoided it his entire life.

There will and should be a lot of eyes on this one.