An abandoned client
Roy Cohn, the New York lawyer who mentored a young Donald Trump and taught him to bully, cheat and lie, was loyal to his client, but he still would absolutely sell out Trump to save himself from prison.
The moral, for an immoral man, is that a lawyer who engages in a crime with a client has no protection from prosecution.
And so many of Trump’s other attorneys have been lining up to rat out the rat in chief, as we saw vividly Tuesday, first with a morning guilty plea by lawyer Jenna Ellis before an Atlanta judge in the Georgia election interference criminal case. The afternoon saw disbarred New York lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump’s one-time fixer, spilling the beans before a Manhattan judge in state Attorney General Tish James’ civil case over Trump’s fake valuation of his holdings.
Ellis’ plea in the conspiracy indictment against Trump et al brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, was the third by a Trump lawyer in that case. Last week, Sidney Powell switched sides. So did Ken Chesebro.
Powell and Chesebro are two of the six unnamed co-conspirators in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump brought in Washington. Ellis was evidently too small a fish for Smith.
A very big fish is Mark Meadows. As Trump’s White House chief of staff, he was the top of the food chain during those nightmare years. Meadows has cut his own deal with Smith to testify, ABC News reported Tuesday.
Trump trusted his lawyers, going back 50 years when Cohn was first retained after the Nixon Department of Justice accused the Trump family real estate business of illegally discriminating against minority renters of their apartments. The charges were true, but Cohn concocted a phony suit against DOJ. Misusing the legal system was Cohn’s specialty.
Trump trusted Cohen to do his dirty work, like arranging the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, which landed Cohen in trouble. After he was convicted of federal felonies and disbarred in 2019, Cohen told Congress about Trump’s false bookkeeping before Cohen reported to prison.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance was listening to Cohen’s testimony and started a criminal probe. In 2022, new DA Alvin Bragg wrongly dropped the prosecution, but Tish James picked it up on the civil side.
Trump has already been found guilty. The ongoing trial downtown will establish the size of his financial penalty. The four pending criminal cases (by Willis, Smith and the document case by Smith and the hush-money payments by Bragg) could put Trump in prison.
There’s another New York lawyer whose law license has been suspended by that same appellate court: Rudy Giuliani. It was U.S. Attorney Giuliani who helped bring down Cohn in 1986 by forcing him to pay $7 million in taxes, interest and penalties for nearly three decades of stiffing the IRS.
Giuliani should save himself and rat out Trump.