Trump already at odds with his lawyer on forcing Judge Chutkan recusal: report
Former President Donald Trump is pushing a legal strategy that his own attorneys believe is unwise – again.
Politico reports that Trump is at odds with attorney John Lauro over immediately pushing for the recusal of D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in his trial for alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States and to deprive Americans of the right to have their votes counted.
Although Lauro has been on the same page as Trump regarding a push to get the trial moved to West Virginia, he has been trying to walk back Trump's demands to go after Judge Chutkan, whom Trump has repeatedly alleged is biased against him.
For instance, on a recent podcast appearance, Lauro said that "we haven’t made a final decision on that issue at all" or whether Judge Chutkan should recuse, and emphasized that "as lawyers we have to be very careful of those issues and handle them with the utmost delicacy."
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This has not stopped Trump from launching more broadsides against Judge Chutkan, whom he said "MUST BE RECUSED" in an angry Monday morning post on his Truth Social platform.
"The back-and-forth on public airwaves and social media underscores the familiar tension between Trump and his legal team, which has been rocked by infighting, departures and conflicting advice in recent months," writes Politico. "All of it, however, is secondary to Trump’s own whims and instincts, which have served him politically but are grating against the rules and norms of behavior for those charged with serious federal crimes."
Trump's decision to blow off the advice of his lawyers is one of the reasons that he got indicted for stashing top-secret government documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, as the indictment alleges that he concealed what he was doing with boxes of documents from his own attorneys who advised him to be more cooperative with the government's requests for their return.