A pair of lawyers for former President Donald Trump announced they were leaving his defense team just hours after he was indicted on classified documents and obstruction charges.
The lawyers, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, announced their move in a statement, soon after Trump issued a post thanking them for their work and saying he would be announcing ‘additional lawyers’ in the coming days without saying who they were.
‘This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation,’ said Trusty and Rowley, without further explanation for the reasons.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 Biden Administration’s partisan weaponization of the American justice system,’ they said.
Trump lawyer Jim Trusty called the prosecution of his client ‘rotten’ and accused DOJ prosecutors of ‘extortion.’ He and John Rowley announced they were resigning from the defense hours after Trump got indicted
Their departure is just the latest legal shakeup involving Trump, who has continued to cycle through lawyers while facing multiple probes relating to classified documents, ‘hush’ payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, January 6, his election overturn effort in Georgia, and his business dealings in New York.
‘Now that the case has been filed in Miami, this is a logical moment for us to step aside and let others carry the cases through to completion,’ they wrote. ‘We have no plans to hold media appearances that address our withdrawals or any other confidential communications we’ve had with the President or his legal team,’ they wrote, CNBC reported.
Trusty, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer with experience in RICO cases, had been fiercely defending Trump just hours before, on a Friday appearance where he clashed with host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s ‘This Week.’
In that appearance, he accused Biden of having ‘authorized’ the Justice Department to try to sink his political rival, something Stephanopoulos said was not the case. He also accused prosecutors of ‘criminal activity’ and extortion in a Thursday night appearance.
Trump wrote Friday after earlier issuing an angry video and posts about the charges: ‘For purposes of fighting the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time, now moving to the Florida Courts, 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 were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and ‘sick’ group of people, the likes of which has not been seen before. We will be announcing additional lawyers in the coming days. When will Joe Biden be Indicted for his many crimes against our Nation? MAGA!
Blanche is representing Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, with a trial set for March amid the presidential campaign.
On Thursday night, Trusty claimed federal prosecutors ‘extorted’ the lawyer for a key witness and is demanding an investigation of internal communications to find out what happened.
That came in a TV appearance that suggested he might have had an inkling his status wasn’t settled.
Asked who would be representing Trump in a Florida courtroom, he said: ‘And we will see. It’ll make some excitement to see who shows up at the table on Tuesday, I guess.
Pressed on whether it wasn’t clear who would be there for Trump, he replied: ‘Yes, we will see where — we will see where it all goes.’
Trusty made the allegations on CNN hours after Trump had been indicted on counts related to retention of 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 DOJ’s National Security Division, who last year urged a court to seal the affidavit that preceded a search of Mar-a-Lago that uncovered classified material there.
His accusations related to the lawyer for former body man Walt Nauta, who served as a military aide to the president in the White House, and who was himself indicted on Friday.
He reportedly moved boxes of documents inside Mar-a-Lago around the time the feds visited seeking to collect government material.
Trusty suggested federal prosecutors, while seeking to line up witnesses that might help them make their case against Trump, sought to apply pressure by bringing up a judgeship that Nauta’s lawyer Stanley Woodward had applied for.
The conversation allegedly occurred when Bratt mentioned during a meeting with Woodward that the lawyer with a deep resume had applied for a judgeship in D.C. In Trusty’s telling, the prosecutors tried to use the information as ‘extortion’ leverage, merely by introducing the topic of the career jump Woodward had sought.
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, appeared before the grand jury in Miami investigating the case this week, praised Trusty in a 2022 Washington Post article on Trump’s struggles finding representation.
‘ The President’s lead counsel in relation to the raid of his home, Jim Trusty and Evan Corcoran, have decades of prosecutorial experience and have litigated some of the most complex cases in American history,’ he said at the time. ‘President Trump is represented by some of the strongest attorneys in the country, and any suggestion otherwise is only driven by envy.’
