Two lawyers for former President Donald Trump have announced they are quitting his defense team just hours after he was indicted on classified documents and obstruction charges.
The attorneys, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, announced their decision in a statement, shortly after Trump posted a message thanking them for their work and saying he would announce ‘additional attorneys’ in the coming days without saying who they were.
“This morning we tendered our resignations as attorneys for President Trump, and we will no longer represent him in either the indicted case or the January 6th investigation,” Trusty and Rowley said, without further ado. explanations of the reasons.
“It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the partisan weaponization of the American justice system by the Biden administration,” they said.
Trump’s attorney, Jim Trusty, called his client’s lawsuit “rotten” and accused DOJ prosecutors of “extortion.” He and John Rowley announced they were resigning from the defense hours after Trump was indicted
Their departure is just the latest legal upheaval involving Trump, who has continued to hire attorneys while facing multiple investigations into classified documents, ‘silent’ payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, on 6 January, his election cancellation effort in Georgia and his business. transactions in New York.
“Now that the case has been filed in Miami, it’s a logical time for us to step aside and let others carry out business,” they wrote. “We do not intend to arrange any media appearances regarding our takedowns or any other confidential communications we have had with the President or his legal team,” they wrote, CNBC reported.
Trusty, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney with experience in RICO cases, had fiercely defended Trump hours earlier in an appearance Friday where he clashed with host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week “.
In that appearance, he accused Biden of “allowing” the Justice Department to try to sink his political rival, which Stephanopoulos said was not the case. He also accused prosecutors of “criminal activity” and extortion during a Thursday evening appearance.
Trump wrote on Friday after earlier posting an angry video and articles about the accusations: ‘For the purposes of fighting the greatest witch hunt of all time, being moved to the courts of Florida, I will be represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later. I want to thank Jim Trusty and John Rowley for their work, but they ran into a very dishonest, corrupt, evil and “sick” group of people the likes of which had never been seen before. We will announce other lawyers in the coming days. When will Joe Biden be charged for his many crimes against our Nation? MAGA!
On Thursday night, Trusty claimed that federal prosecutors “extorted” the attorney of a key witness and demanded an internal communications investigation to find out what happened.
Trusty made the allegations about CNN hours after Trump was indicted on charges related to withholding classified documents and a violation of the Espionage Act, calling it a “corrupt and politicized” process.
Then Trusty went after federal prosecutor Jay Bratt, head of the counterintelligence section of the DOJ’s national security division, who last year urged a court to seal the affidavit that preceded a search of Mar-a-Lago which discovered classified documents.
His charges related to the lawyer of former corps man Walt Nauta, who served as the President’s military aide in the White House, and who himself was charged on Friday.
He allegedly moved boxes of documents inside Mar-a-Lago around the time federal authorities visited to search for government documents.
Trusty suggested that federal prosecutors, while seeking to line up witnesses who could help them plead their case against Trump, sought to exert pressure by offering a judgeship that Nauta’s attorney, Stanley Woodward, had requested.
The conversation allegedly took place when Bratt mentioned in a meeting with Woodward that the attorney with the extensive resume had applied for a DC judgeship According to Trusty, prosecutors attempted to use the information as leverage for “extortion,” simply by introducing the subject of the career jump that Woodward had sought.
