Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…
[Regarding this story: Inside Trump’s Botched Attempt to Hire Trey Gowdy]
The fact that Trump is the nightmare client of all nightmare clients evidently outweighs the attention and publicity that would benefit such a lawyer that might defend him in the looming impeachment proceedings, because he’s unable to find an attorney whose greed outweighs their common sense.
Watching Pat Cipollone get shredded by his peers after his 8-page alternate legal reality letter dropped can’t be helping a ton either.
It’s telling about Trump as a bad client, but I think it’s also telling about how bad the facts relating to the Ukraine phone call are. The defense so far has been to angrily and demonstrably call people biased liars without ever explaining what they’re lying about, or how supposed bias changes anything.
If you stand back from the noisy rhetoric and look at this as dryly as possible, you’ll see that there’s only an appearance of a conflict between stories — sound and fury signifying nothing — but the pertinent facts themselves aren’t in dispute.
And so, how do you defend facts which you’re not ready to contest, except by preventing the facts from ever being tried?
As tricky as that question is in the abstract, it’s far worse in reality because Trump won’t listen to legal advice much less follow it, will add self-damning wrinkles along the way, concede the very thing you’re contending and justify it by saying “because I can,” and then blame you when things inevitably go FUBAR.
Also…
Regarding Syria, it’s as if Trump, without warning, pushed a baby carriage down a steep hill into traffic then immediately picked up the phone to yell at the manufacturer about the carriage’s faulty brakes.
A week from now Republicans will be arguing that the carriage manufacturer conspired to make Trump look bad by recently switching to newer, untested brakes, necessitating an investigation to uncover whether Carriage co. donated to Clinton in 2016.
