As the legal risks facing Donald Trump and his inner circle continue to expand, the former U.S. president and key allies have been playing round robin with a small pool of defense lawyers.
Trump’s legal matters are multiplying — the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate Monday as part of an investigation into whether presidential records, including classified material, were mishandled — and he’s pulling from a cadre of lawyers in his orbit with proven conservative bona fides or a track record of representing people loyal to him.
"It used to be in Washington that white-collar lawyers would represent both Democrats and Republicans who were caught up in an investigation. What mattered was whether the lawyer was good and not the lawyer’s ideology,” defense attorney Matt Kaiser, who also teaches attorney ethics at Georgetown University Law Center, wrote in an email. These days, "It’s a D.C. lawyer version of the political polarization that is happening across the country.”