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The president’s legal team must maintain his support in the Senate while arguing his case to a broader jury: voters watching at home.
President Trump has expanded his legal team in hopes of securing a quick acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial. The lawyers he has enlisted include frequent guests on Fox News and former independent counsels who investigated President Bill Clinton. Together, they must maintain Mr. Trump’s support in the Senate while arguing his case to a broader jury: voters watching at home.
Here is a look at the team defending the president from impeachment articles charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Special adviser
Pam Bondi, who served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019, has been considered a rising Republican star. When she endorsed Mr. Trump for president in 2016, she said they had been friends for years. In 2013, Mr. Trump donated $25,000 to a group supporting Ms. Bondi and later faced questions over whether the gift was intended to ward off a review by Ms. Bondi’s office of fraud allegations at Trump University.
Last year, Ms. Bondi joined a lobbying firm run by a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump. The firm has since been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors as part of an investigation into two associates of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, who have been charged with violating campaign finance laws, according to people familiar with the investigation. A frequent guest on Fox News, Ms. Bondi has called the president’s impeachment a “sham.”
White House counsel
Since being named White House counsel a year ago, Pat A. Cipollone has earned Mr. Trump’s trust, according to people close to the president. Unlike his predecessor, Donald F. McGahn II, who privately referred to Mr. Trump as “King Kong” and sought to curb some of his potentially self-destructive impulses, Mr. Cipollone is known to stay behind the scenes and has been described as more temperamentally agreeable to Mr. Trump.
Born in the Bronx to Italian immigrants, Mr. Cipollone, who is 53 and a father of 10, has been deeply involved in Catholic activities such as helping found the National Prayer Breakfast. During the House impeachment inquiry, Mr. Cipollone signed an eight-page letter that made a blistering argument against cooperating with the inquiry in any way.
[Read more about Mr. Cipollone.]
Professor emeritus at Harvard Law School
Alan M. Dershowitz, who has represented a long list of famous clients such as Claus von Bülow, O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson, will present oral arguments at the Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s legal team said. Once seen as a liberal, he prides himself on being a contrarian. In 2008, he helped negotiate a lenient sentence for Jeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier who was accused of sex trafficking and killed himself last year in a Manhattan jail. He has also been accused of engaging in sex with an underage girl he met through Mr. Epstein. Mr. Dershowitz, 81, has denied the claim.
Mr. Dershowitz, an acquaintance of Mr. Trump’s since the 1990s, has become a Fox News staple, attacking the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and defending Mr. Trump’s right to fire James B. Comey as F.B.I. director.
[Read more about Mr. Dershowitz.]
Lawyer in private practice
Eric D. Herschmann, the least familiar name on Mr. Trump’s legal roster, is a partner at Kasowitz Benson Torres in New York who specializes in white-collar defense and investigations as well as commercial and securities litigation.
From 2009 to 2012, he was vice chairman of Southern Union Company, a natural gas firm. Mr. Herschmann was also legal counsel for Citibank’s corporate audit department, a senior litigation counsel and an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.
Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer
A former federal prosecutor who specializes in white-collar defense, Jane Serene Raskin has been a constant but little-known presence in Mr. Trump’s orbit since the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
In 2018, Mr. Trump hired her and her husband, Marty Raskin, after the F.B.I. searched the home and office of Michael D. Cohen, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, as part of an investigation into payments Mr. Cohen had made to silence a pornographic film star who claimed that she had had an affair with Mr. Trump. In the 1980s, Ms. Raskin worked for William F. Weld, an assistant attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, who later became the governor of Massachusetts and is now running a quixotic campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. It remains to be seen whether Ms. Raskin will have a speaking role during the Senate trial. If her history with Mr. Trump is any guide, she may remain a silent partner.
[Read more about Ms. Raskin.]
Former independent counsel
Robert W. Ray succeeded Ken Starr as the independent counsel investigating Mr. Clinton in 1999. A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Ray had planned to indict Mr. Clinton when he left office for the same crimes considered during the impeachment.
But Mr. Ray and Mr. Clinton struck a deal that prevented Mr. Clinton from being prosecuted in return for surrendering his law license and paying a $25,000 fine. After leaving the federal government, Mr. Ray, 59, went into private practice. In 2006, he turned himself into the police on a low-level charge of stalking a former girlfriend. A law enforcement official said the case was sealed, suggesting it was most likely dismissed.
[Read more about Mr. Ray.]
Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer
A conservative media personality with deep ties to the evangelical community, Jay Sekulow will lead the president’s impeachment defense with Mr. Cipollone. He is one of the longest-serving members of Mr. Trump’s personal legal team, and is a frequent commentator on Fox News and on Christian television.
Mr. Sekulow, 63, was once an observant Jew, but he would embrace Christianity while attending Atlanta Baptist College, now Mercer University, where he also attended law school. In 1990, the televangelist Pat Robertson hired Mr. Sekulow as chief counsel for the American Center for Law & Justice, a group founded in opposition to the American Civil Liberties Union. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Sekulow won a string of Supreme Court cases by arguing that bans on various forms of religious expression in public places violated the right to free speech.
[Read more about Mr. Sekulow.]
Former independent counsel
One of the best known and most polarizing legal figures in the country, Ken Starr conducted the investigation of Mr. Clinton that led to the president’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice in 1998. A household name in the 1990s, he was reviled by critics as a moralistic, sex-obsessed prosecutor and admired by others as an upright truth-seeker pursuing a lying, philandering president who had dishonored the Oval Office. Mr. Starr resigned as independent counsel in 1999, lamenting the “intense politicization” of his investigation.
He later served as dean of the Pepperdine University Law School and as president of Baylor University but was demoted by and later resigned from Baylor after an investigation found the university had mishandled accusations of sexual assault against members of its football team. In recent months, Mr. Starr, 73, has become a regular commentator defending Mr. Trump on Fox News.
[Read more about Mr. Starr.]
Reporting was contributed by Annie Karni, Maggie Haberman, Elizabeth Williamson, Eileen Sullivan and Peter Baker.
