Trump expands legal team for impeachment trial
WASHINGTON — The team of lawyers expected to guide President Donald Trump toward an election-year acquittal in the Senate expanded suddenly Friday to include Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz, two of the biggest legal celebrities of the 1990s, who have drawn attention with their television appearances and involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s defense against charges of child prostitution in the mid2000s.
Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, and Dershowitz, the Harvard Law emeritus professor who advised the defense team in football star O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, were announced as the newest members of Trump’s defense. The group will also include former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi and former independent counsel Robert Ray, according to Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s personal attorneys, who will lead the defense with the White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
The four new lawyers were selected personally by Trump for their political-legal celebrity and vocal defenses of the president in the media – and despite the significant professional baggage that several of them bring to the impeachment saga.
Trump faces possible removal from office after the House
impeached him last month on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He is expected to survive the trial, thanks to the Senate’s Republican majority, though a weeks-long spectacle laying out allegations about his conduct toward Ukraine could be an embarrassing ordeal for the president.
Starr, 73, became a national figure in 1994 when he was named independent counsel to lead the investigation of the Whitewater scandal. That probe eventually focused on Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and produced a hefty report that described their encounters in lurid detail. By the time the House impeached Clinton in December 1998, Starr had become a lightning rod and a symbol of what Clinton supporters viewed as the puritanical mania of Republicans bent on driving the president from office.
Trump sees the presence of Starr, a former solicitor general who was once considered for a nomination to the Supreme Court, as a way to shore up his credibility during the Senate trial. He repeatedly tweeted praise for Starr’s friendly commentary during the House impeachment proceedings.
The president’s attitude was quite different in 1999.
To MSNBC, Trump said: “I think Ken Starr is a lunatic. I really think that Ken Starr is a disaster. ...I really think that Ken Starr was terrible.”
To columnist Maureen Dowd, he said: “Starr’s a freak. I bet he’s got something in his closet.”
To CNBC, he said: “I mean, can you imagine those evenings when [Clinton’s] just being lambasted by this crazy Ken Starr, who is a total wacko? ...I mean, he is totally off his rocker.”
After returning to private practice in 1999, Starr became the dean of Pepperdine University’s law school and then the president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in 2010.
In 2016, he was ousted from Baylor amid an unfolding scandal over the school’s handling of sexual assault allegations involving members of the football team. An investigation found that Baylor had “failed to consistently support” victims of sexual assault and “failed to take action to identify and eliminate a potentially hostile environment, prevent its recurrence, or address its effects.”
Starr has claimed he did not know about the allegations, telling NPR in 2018: “Unfortunately – and this is going to sound like an apologia, but it is the absolute truth – never was it brought to my attention that there were these issues.”
In the mid-2000s, Starr and Dershowitz were part of Epstein’s legal team when the wealthy investor was under investigation on suspicion of child prostitution. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, was found dead in his jail cell last year in an apparent suicide. A plea deal that Epstein’s accusers have criticized as overly lenient was struck with Alex Acosta, a U.S. attorney in Florida during that period.
After renewed criticism of the deal led to Acosta’s resignation as labor secretary last year, Starr described his own role in the case, saying he was enlisted to make a constitutional argument that the crimes Epstein was accused of were state, not federal, offenses.
“I was making a federalism argument,” Starr told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in July 2019. “Don’t federally criminalize this area of the law that really does belong to the states. ... There were no allegations of crossing state lines in the Florida situation.”
In the interview, Starr called the accusations against Epstein “serious ... obviously.”
Dershowitz’s friendship with Epstein has produced a war of lawsuits and countersuits.
After Virginia Roberts Giuffre claimed she had sex with Dershowitz at Epstein’s behest in the early 2000s, when she was underage, Dershowitz issued a torrent of denials, calling her a “certified, complete, total liar” who invented the accusation to sell her story. Giuffre is suing him for defamation, and Dershowitz has countersued her for defamation.
Some White House officials hoped Trump would not pick Dershowitz, to avoid references to his entanglement with Epstein.
In an interview with The Washington Post last month, Dershowitz declined to say whether he would join the team. “Just ask me if I’ve had sex with any underage girls, that I’m happy to answer. And the answer is no,” he said.
The legal drama surrounding Dershowitz’s involvement with Epstein has, at times, overshadowed the 81-yearold’s legacy as one of America’s best-known courtroom stars. He was a constant presence in American living rooms as part of the defense team during Simpson’s trial, which was televised live. But by then, he was already a household name, immortalized on the big screen in the film “Reversal of Fortune,” which documented his successful appeal of socialite Claus von Bulow’s conviction for the attempted murder of his wealthy wife.
In Trump, Dershowitz has found a client with a similar appetite for bombast – though his embrace of the president came as a surprise to some. He opposed Trump in the 2016 campaign and has described himself as a “loyal liberal” who has supported Democratic presidential candidates since the 1950s.
But when Trump’s legal problems were mounting, Dershowitz proved to be a headline-grabbing advocate for the embattled president. On television, he made his position clear: “A sitting president cannot be charged with a crime.” In 2018, he published a book titled “The Case Against Impeaching Trump.”