Entire Trump legal defense team quits

Now this here is kind of funny:

Former President Donald Trump’s five impeachment defense attorneys have left a little more than a week before his trial is set to begin, according to people familiar with the case, amid a disagreement over his legal strategy.

It was a dramatic development in the second impeachment trial for Trump, who has struggled to find lawyers willing to take his case. And now, with legal briefs due next week and a trial set to begin only days later, Trump is clinging to his election fraud charade and suddenly finds himself without legal representation.

Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, who were expected to be two of the lead attorneys, are no longer on the team. A source familiar with the changes said it was a mutual decision for both to leave the legal team. As the lead attorney, Bowers assembled the team.

A few minutes later the CNN story got updated:

Josh Howard, a North Carolina attorney who was recently added to the team, has also left, according to another source familiar with the changes. Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris, from South Carolina, are no longer involved with the case, either.

No other attorneys have announced they are working on Trump’s impeachment defense.

A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.

Meanwhile, I hear there’s a widow of a deceased Nigerian general who needs your help transferring an immense sum of money, and she wants you to have 20% of it:

The attorneys had not yet been paid any advance fees and a letter of intent was never signed.

Also too, the reporters of this story want you to know that erstwhile lead attorney Butch Bowers is an honorable man:

Bowers, a respected lawyer from Columbia, South Carolina, once worked in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

So are they all, all honorable men.

Let’s get one thing straight: there’s nothing “respectable” about representing Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. Trump doesn’t have any legal right to be represented by a lawyer in this context: it’s not a criminal trial, and if no real lawyer is willing to represent him, well that’s just too bad.

The notion that someone like Trump has a “right” to have lawyers help him out in this context is a particularly perverse abuse of the concept of the right to counsel.

If you represent Trump in this context it’s either because you think what Trump did on January 6th was affirmatively good, or you like money — or more realistically the promise of money — enough to overcome your distaste for murderous sedition. In other words, choosing to be Trump’s lawyer in his second impeachment trial is absolutely no different than choosing, right here right now, to take Trump’s money, or the promise of his money, in any non-legal context. It makes you a Trump supporter, period.

Speaking of which, this story is no doubt having Viagra-like effects on the Dersh and Jonathan Turley, since if you can’t get a real lawyer you can always turn to legal academia.

Of course it’s also completely predictable that Trump refuses to employ the only semi-sound legal strategery available to him, aka, a simple if deeply disingenuous process objection, and instead is insisting on the novel “it’s not an impeachable offense to foment a seditious coup at the Capitol that got some people killed if I just keep claiming with zero evidence to back me that the election was stolen” defense.