Last-ditch effort to delay trial could see Trump fire his whole legal team: expert
Donald Trump may be lining up a mass firing of his legal team in a last-ditch effort to delay his fast-approaching criminal trials, a legal expert warned Monday.
Just two weeks before his hush money case is slated to go to court — which would be first of four criminal trials to be heard by a jury — former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance wrote that he’s desperately looking for ways to avoid it.
She said on her Civil Discourse substack that the former president could try to force Judge Juan Merchan to recuse himself. But, failing that, there are only three options available to him.
"With trial only two weeks away, Trump is showing increasing signs of desperation," she wrote. "There are also the time-honored strategies of the desperate: getting sick or finding a sick or dying family member and firing your lawyers.”
Jury selection in the New York trial is set to begin April 15. It concerns business fraud charges involving payments he allegedly arranged to an adult movie actress to hide an affair the pair had from voters in the 2016 presidential election.
On Sunday in a Truth Social post, he demanded the judge in the case recuse himself because his daughter’s work with a political consultancy firm that has Democratic Party clients makes him biased against Trump.
Experts including Andrew Weissmann, who was one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the 2016 election investigation, have said that’s likely to be a non-starter.
"What happens if Trump fires his lawyers?” Joyce asked.
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“This can be a difficult one because defendants are entitled to counsel of their choosing, and lawyers are entitled to sufficient time to prepare. But Trump has a lot of lawyers on his team and the Judge has to be prepared for this one.
“Trump would have to argue a significant issue has developed with his lawyers before the Judge would agree to let them out of the case, and it's going to be difficult to do that with all of them. The Judge could tell him to go ahead with the remaining lawyers, because if Trump does this at the eleventh hour, it's going to look manufactured.
“But it's still an issue the Judge has to be careful about to avoid problems on appeal, and so far, Judge Merchan has shown himself to be a careful, meticulous jurist."
Trump is also facing three other criminal trials — two, in Georgia and Washington, D.C., involve attempts to overthrow the 2020 election and one, in Florida, is related to classified documents he kept when leaving office.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.