Trump’s personal lawyer just released a letter filled with typos
“Predisent” Trump is innocent, says his lawyer.
Marc Kasowitz is a longtime attorney for Donald Trump or, as he put it in a letter released today in response to former FBI Director James Comey’s Senate testimony, he’s Predisent Trump’s personal lawyer.
From that opening typo, the letter goes on to make a number of remarkable claims, including the assertion that Comey lied under oath about Trump’s demand of loyalty, the assertion that even though Trump did not make the loyalty demand “he is entitled to expect loyalty from those serving in an administration,” and the strange claim that executive privilege somehow prevents Comey from voluntarily discussing his conversations with Trump with the public.
But even more remarkably, the typo in the first line is not even the only typo in the letter. Kasowitz also misspells the name of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
And there are weird extra periods scattered at the end of various paragraphs.
There is a real pattern of Donald Trump’s sometimes sloppy work being exacerbated by shoddy staff work.
Wednesday night, for example, the White House press office released a readout of his phone call “with Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates.” There is no crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The guy Trump spoke to is the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
It’s true that the Emir of Abu Dhabi invariably ends up serving as the president of the United Arab Emirates, and thus the crown prince of Abu Dhabi is also the heir apparent to the UAE presidency. But there is a whole State Department full of people who are available to help the White House with these protocol issues, and Trump’s team seems incapable of calling on them.
Amazingly, the White House even responded to a request for comment from the Huffington Post earlier this month about why so many conservatives think the administration is incompetent with a statement that included a typo.
The bigger point here isn’t the typos — anyone can make mistakes. It’s more revealing about the attention to detail from Trump and the people Trump has working for him.
The biggest law firms in the country seem to be largely taking a pass on defending Trump, since they think an unpopular and undisciplined client would end up reflecting poorly on the firm. That’s left Trump in the hands of a kind of legal C-team, which is really his problem. But deploying the same sloppy approach to substantive policy work is a problem for the country.