Donald Trump is mad at his attorney Todd Blanche, and is complaining about him constantly.
The New York Times, citing four anonymous sources, reports that the former president is mad that Blanche isn’t following his instructions closely in his hush-money trial, and isn’t being aggressive enough. Trump reportedly wants to see Blanche attacking witnesses, the judge, and even the jury pool in the case more often.
But if Blanche isn’t being aggressive, it might be for a good reason. The attorney has already been reprimanded once for trying to defend Trump against a gag order, claiming that Trump’s posts on Truth Social didn’t violate the order. That drew the ire of Judge Juan Merchan.
“Mr. Blanche, you are losing all credibility with the court,” Merchan warned last week.
The Times article mentions that Trump often vents about not having someone like Roy Cohn, his former infamous lawyer who had a reputation for ruthlessness and dirty tricks. Trump’s complaints track with the rest of his poor record with lawyers. Trump has a history of failing to pay his lawyers, who also tend to quit often. The top lawyer in his classified documents case, Evan Corcoran, quit just a few months ago. Two other lawyers left his legal team last year amid reports of infighting. At least one lawyer on his legal team, Alina Habba, says she was chosen for her looks over her intelligence, and her bizarre defenses of the former president seem to confirm that.
Blanche, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, has been representing Trump since June, and has previously represented other figures in Trump’s orbit, such as his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort and Igor Fruman, an associate of Rudy Giuliani. He has a tall order in defending Trump from 34 felony charges for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair prior to the 2016 election. If he’s not performing to Trump’s liking, he might not last much longer.
Unfortunately More on Trump:
While even top GOP lawmakers are yielding to the will of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, at least one Republican who used to work in Trump’s White House says she has to vote for the other guy.
Former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews torched Trump and the dissenting conservatives who’ve bent their knee to him in recent months, telling MSNBC that it’s “really frustrating” because “a lot of Republicans” that she has spoken to, including top elected officials, “will bash him privately, but many of them will not even say it publicly.”
“A lot of times what they often say is that they’re supporting him because of the policies, that they want the conservative agenda. And where I get really frustrated is that they’re treating this like it’s a normal election, a normal Republican candidate,