- South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers will represent Trump in his second impeachment.
- Senator Graham made this announcement on a call on Thursday with Republican senators, for Punchbowl News.
- Trump’s former allies are distancing himself from him, initially casting doubt on who would defend the former president.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
South Carolina lawyer Butch Bowers will represent former President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial in the United States Senate.
Senator Lindsey Graham made this announcement on a call with Republican senators on Thursday, Punchbowl news reported.
Bowers, who runs his law firm in Columbia, South Carolina, has a long history of representing elected officials and political candidates on government and electoral issues, according to the Bowers Law Office website.
He previously served as a lawyer for former South Carolina governors. Nikki Haley and Mark Sanford, and also represented former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory and the South Carolina State Election Commission in ID lawsuits. of the voter.
CNN reported on Thursday, Trump’s impeachment trial could have been postponed due to the former president having no legal representative to defend him.
On January 13, the House voted 232-197 for Trump’s impeachment on charges of inciting the January 6 violent pro-Trump uprising on the U.S. Capitol. The network said the Chamber could send the articles as early as Friday.
The Senate, split between 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, now needs to administer a delicate balancing act of holding hearings and confirming votes for those nominated for President Joe Biden’s office, while also conducting an impeachment trial.
Read More: Joe Biden’s Waiting Cabinet: Tracking nominees for important roles like Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury and more
Several prominent conservative lawyers who previously worked for Trump and large law firms are now distancing themselves from the former president because of his role in spreading false conspiracy theories about the election and then inciting the Capitol riot, reported the Bloomberg News on January 14.
Bloomberg said many of the lawyers who represented Trump or helped defend him in his first trial, including former White House lawyer Pat Cipollone, former Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi and former adviser Eric Herschmann. he refused to represent Trump this time or did not express interest in doing so.
Law firms like Porter Wright and Snell & Wilmer have also abandoned their representation of the Trump campaign in several post-election processes after the public reaction. Even the great law firm Jones Day has publicly distanced himself from Trump.
Another prominent conservative lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, resigned from Foley & Lardner after participating in a phone call in which Trump pressured Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to overturn the state’s presidential election results.
Read More: Trump did not forgive himself. Here is the huge legal hazard tsunami that now awaits.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who represented the president in some of his lawsuits that question the election results after the November 3 election, said he cannot represent the president at his trial because he qualifies as a witness to the events. Giuliani spoke at the pre-insurrection rally in Washington, DC, and called for “trial by combat”, which he later said was a reference to “Game of Thrones” and not a suggestion for committing violence, as in the ensuing riot the rally immediately.
Bloomberg said some of the people who could defend Trump include Republican representatives Jim Jordan and Elise Stefanik, as well as the controversial conservative lawyer and law professor John Eastman, who represented Trump in an amicus brief to a case in the state Supreme Court. Texas, which sought to invalidate and annul the election results in various states of the battlefield. The court refused to hear the case.
“I think that reflects Trump’s position today, where he has relatively little to offer and people don’t want to be associated with him in general,” Keith Whittington, professor of political science at Princeton University told Bloomberg. “The fact is, he’s not going to make Team A.”
It is unclear whether Trump, who left for his Florida home on Wednesday, would return to Washington, DC, for trial. Trump himself did not testify in his first impeachment trial, when the Senate acquitted him of two charges of abusing his office and obstructing Congress.