President Trump’s legal defense roster is nearly finalized, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone will lead a team of lawyers during the high-stakes Senate impeachment trial starting next Tuesday.
Sources familiar with the decision said Cipollone, who joined the Trump administration in October 2018 following the departure of Don McGahn, will be joined by Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, who began representing the president in summer 2017 as the White House navigated special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. The duo, along with Cipollone’s deputies Patrick Philbin and Michael Purpura, will defend Trump against articles of impeachment passed by the Democratic House of Representatives last month that allege Trump abused his power regarding Ukraine and obstructed Congress’s inquiry into the matter. Much of the Trump team’s legal defense has already been prepared.
Whether Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz also joins the legal team remains to be seen, and there is little indication that any of Trump’s staunch Republican defenders in the House will be asked to join the trial effort in the Senate. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was at the White House on Friday and met Vice President Mike Pence but is not part of the legal defense. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has made no secret of his desire to join the impeachment legal team.
Cipollone, 53, is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, the United States’ largest law firm, and worked as an assistant for Attorney General William Barr during Barr’s first stint in the role in 1992 and 1993. A staunch Catholic, Cipollone is a father of 10, a founding member of the National Prayer Breakfast, and a board member of the Catholic Information Center.
The senior counsel has been harshly critical of the Democrat-led impeachment of Trump. The White House did not participate in House-led hearings, although they are prepared to mount a full-throated defense in the Senate.
“This baseless and highly partisan inquiry violates all past historical precedent, basic due process rights, and fundamental fairness,” Cipollone said in one letter to House Democrats last December. He told them they’d “wasted enough of America’s time with this charade” and that adopting the articles of impeachment “would be a reckless abuse of power” and “would constitute the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional attempt at impeachment in our nation’s history” in another letter.
Sekulow, 63, has served as Trump’s private attorney for more than two years and is the founder and chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a prominent religious liberty nonprofit organization. Sekulow has argued before the Supreme Court a dozen times and has his own radio show and rock band. Sekulow was a Mueller critic and is just as dismissive of the Ukraine allegations.
“The Mueller report went nowhere. These articles of impeachment in the Senate will go nowhere. And that’s going to be the end of this, and we’ll be on to the next fight,” Sekulow said on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s radio show in late December. “I’ll tell you what an abuse of power is: writing up an article of impeachment about obstruction of Congress when you’re exercising your constitutional rights.”
Philbin, a graduate of Harvard Law School who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a Cipollone deputy who will also play a big role in Trump’s defense. Also a former partner at Kirkland & Ellis, he worked at the Department of Justice during George W. Bush’s administration as an associate deputy and then deputy assistant attorney general, where he waded into controversial issues such as the legal justification for holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the internal debate over warrantless wiretapping.
Purpura, another deputy White House counsel, is a U.S. Military Academy and Columbia University Law School graduate who formerly worked as a federal prosecutor and as an associate counsel during Bush’s presidency. He helped negotiate the terms of the House testimony for the National Security Council’s former Russia expert Fiona Hill and was present during the questioning of former White House communications director Hope Hicks during her closed-door testimony with the House Judiciary Committee last summer, before the Ukraine controversy.
Dershowitz, the author of The Case Against The Democratic House Impeaching Trump, told the Washington Examiner it would not be appropriate for him to comment on whether he was still in discussions to join Trump’s legal team, but he praised those already on it.
“I can tell you this: Both Cipollone and Sekulow are extraordinary lawyers,” Dershowitz said. “They’re both at the top of their profession, and they bring not only real legal talent and experience but great judgment, and that will be very important in this matter.”
Dershowitz said he “believed very strongly that the two articles of impeachment do not charge constitutionally permissible impeachable offenses.” Dershowitz also said that even if Democrats managed to successfully call former national security adviser John Bolton as a witness, Trump would likely invoke executive privilege and would have the courts on his side, and this could open up the door to the GOP forcing Hunter Biden or Joe Biden to testify.
Giuliani remains a wild card, telling reporters at Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago that he would testify.
“Or, I’d do what I do best: I’d try the case,” he said, adding, “I don’t know if anybody would have the courage to give me the case.”
Giuliani has already publicly defended Trump, tweeting that “the Supreme Court should step in and rule this impeachment unconstitutional.” He said in a Fox News interview, “It’s nonconstitutional, it’s null and void, it shouldn’t have happened, it was totally illegal.”
Most of the Republicans in Congress who have been mentioned as possible members of the legal team are mum, though Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio told Fox & Friends this morning that “I’m happy to join the president’s legal team if that’s what the president and that’s what Pat Cipollone and the White House counsel’s team wants and that’s what the Senate wants.” Jordan’s press secretary said, “The decision is entirely up to the White House.”
The offices for Reps. John Ratcliffe of Texas, Doug Collins of Georgia, and Mark Meadows of North Carolina all declined the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
Pam Bondi, 53, a former two-term Florida attorney general who joined the Trump administration last October, will help lead the legal team’s communications operation. Bondi, a Fox News regular, endorsed Trump just before the GOP’s Florida primary in 2016. And Tony Sayegh, 43, will join Bondi on the impeachment communications team after leading public affairs at Trump’s Treasury Department from 2017 to 2019. Sayegh is a longtime Republican strategist and spent years as a Fox News guest and contributor.
