It can’t be easy to serve as a member of Donald Trump’s legal defense team. Their colleagues keep quitting. Others are facing disbarment. Some are facing unwelcome scrutiny from criminal prosecutors. Their client, meanwhile, has struggled to hire new attorneys because no one wants to work for him.
Making matters quite a bit worse is the unavoidable fact that the former president’s lawyers keep losing. Take this week, for example.
Team Trump begged the Georgia Supreme Court to derail a looming indictment from the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, claiming that the ongoing investigation risked violating his “fundamental constitutional rights.” This failed spectacularly: The justices were unanimous in smacking down the case.
Roughly 48 hours later, the former president’s legal team suffered another setback. Reuters reported:
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial after a jury found the former U.S. president liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million. In a 59-page decision, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan also dismissed Trump’s arguments for reducing damages to less than $1 million.
Making matters worse, while the federal judge was rejecting Team Trump’s request, the jurist also wrote, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
Kaplan added, “Mr. Trump’s attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Ms. Carroll’s breasts through her clothing is frivolous.” He went on to conclude that a jury clearly found that the former president had “ ‘raped’ her in the sense of that term broader than the New York Penal Law definition.” That was this morning. This afternoon, Trump’s quest to move his Manhattan hush money prosecution from state to federal court, which my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin recently explored in detail, flopped. CNBC reported: Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday lost a bid to transfer to federal court his New York state court case related to a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s decision denying that effort keeps Trump on track to go to trial on March 25 in Manhattan Supreme Court in the case.
Is there any good news for the former president and his legal defense team? At this point, I suppose one might argue that it’s good for them that Judge Eileen Cannon hasn’t yet ruled against them in Florida, but even she’s expressed skepticism about their effort to push off one of his criminal trials until after Election Day 2024. It’s tempting to think this losing streak reflects bad luck, but fortune has nothing to do with it: Team Trump keeps losing because they’re filing bad cases backed by bad arguments.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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