The departure of attorney Joe Tacopina comes as the order and dates of the former president’s many trials remain in doubt.
The departure of attorney Joe Tacopina comes as the order and dates of the former president’s many trials remain in doubt.
I owa caucus day happens to be the eve of jury selection in former president Donald Trump’s second E. Jean Carroll trial — a civil case over defamation damages in Manhattan federal court. He will be facing it, along with the state case against him in Manhattan criminal court, without his best trial lawyer.
The Times’s Maggie Haberman reports that Joe Tacopina has withdrawn from representation of Trump in both those cases.
Trump often has tumultuous relationships with his legal representatives (which, as Dan McLaughlin has noted, is why he has trouble getting good representation even though his high-profile litigations would otherwise be attractive to ambitious lawyers). Tacopina is not speaking about the matter publicly, so it is unclear why he has withdrawn. I suspect, though I do not know, that it could have something to do with Trump’s public attack on Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York for denying his request to postpone the trial for a week, due to the upcoming funeral of his mother-in-law in Florida.
As I detailed throughout the first E. Jean Carroll trial — which arose out of the journalist’s claim (vehemently denied by Trump) that he sexually assaulted her many years ago, then defamed her when she went public about it — Trump often put Tacopina in difficult straits with Judge Kaplan. The “client from hell” did not show up at the trial, and did not present any defense, much less testify before the jury; but in a steady drumbeat throughout the proceedings, Trump publicly lambasted the plaintiff and the judge, despite the latter’s admonitions. As usually happens when a defendant fails to testify at a civil trial (based on which omission, the jury is permitted to draw a negative inference — unlike in a criminal trial), Trump was found liable and directed to pay $5 million in damages. Tacopina conducted an appropriately vigorous cross-examination of Carroll but could not overcome Trump’s approach to the matter.
The second trial is based on similar defamation claims drawn from statements Trump made after the first trial, as well as statements he made as president that were not at issue in the first trial (because Trump’s civil-immunity claim, which he ultimately lost, was still being litigated in the appellate courts). Because the liability issue was decided by the first jury, which heard extensive testimony from Carroll and other women about Trump’s alleged sexual aggressiveness, Judge Kaplan has ruled that the liability issue has already been resolved against the defendant. Hence, the trial starting tomorrow is strictly about damages. It should take one to two weeks.
As is implicit from the above discussion, defendants are not required to attend federal civil trials, though they are entitled to do so if they choose to — as most do (prudently figuring that, since the jurors are compelled to attend, it’s in the litigants’ interest to do so as well). Trump has maintained that, unlike the first trial, he wants to attend the second one. But he asked Kaplan to postpone it, explaining that he’d be traveling to Florida Wednesday for the funeral on Thursday of Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, who died at 78 last week.
The judge, however, noted that Trump had scheduled a campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday — ergo, it was not merely funeral travel that was preventing Trump’s trial attendance but, rather, his choice to be someplace else. This seems a bit churlish, but it’s an issue that will arise frequently as Trump — the prohibitive favorite for the Republican presidential nomination — attempts to navigate his legal travails while campaigning.
Trump being Trump, he ranted over the weekend that the judges overseeing his civil and criminal cases are “animals.” Kaplan, in particular, he described as a “terrible, biased, irrationally angry Clinton-appointed judge” in a Saturday post on his Truth Social platform. As Forbes reports, the former president then proceeded with his tirelessly repeated insistence that he does not know E. Jean Carroll and that her sexual-assault claims are false (which, if past is prologue, could prompt Carroll to launch new defamation suits).
Joe Tacopina is a busy, prominent New York defense lawyer who doesn’t need Trump’s business. He may have decided another week or two of dealing with judicial pique over an uncontrollable client’s carping was not worth the aggravation.
Tacopina was also leading the defense team representing Trump in the criminal prosecution brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected progressive Democrat. Bragg outrageously piled 34 business-fraud counts into an indictment against Trump based on how the former president and his privately held company booked the hush money paid to porn star Stephanie Clifford (stage name “Stormy Daniels”) in 2016. That is, though notorious for non-enforcement of the law against habitual criminals, Bragg has taken misdemeanors as to which the statute-of-limitations has lapsed — misdemeanors he would not have charged against anyone not named Donald Trump — and attempted to inflate them into nearly three-dozen felonies.
Bragg’s case was initially scheduled to go to trial on March 25. Understandably not tripping over himself to proceed, however, Bragg indicated his willingness to defer to the federal prosecutions against Trump, which could push the trial into 2025.
Yet, Trump’s scheduled March 5 criminal trial in the federal election-interference case in Washington, D.C., expected to be a two-to-three-month affair, is likely to be delayed because the Supreme Court is not expected to rule on key obstruction issues that could dramatically affect the case until late June. Meantime, Trump’s scheduled May 20 criminal trial in the federal Mar-a-Lago documents case in Florida, also expected to be a two-to-three-month affair, is in even more doubt — it seems inconceivable that the court could rule on all the classified-information issues prior to that trial date (as federal law requires), and there could also be pretrial appeals.
If Trump’s federal trials are postponed, as I expect they will be, that could open up March for the state trial on Bragg’s indictment, as initially contemplated. Nevertheless, given that the parties may have been proceeding on the assumption that the trial would not take place in March, it could be that a March date is now impractical — especially given that the defendant may now be looking for a new lawyer.
I won’t even hazard a guess at this point on what will become of the state election-interference RICO case against Trump in Georgia. The 19-defendant sprawl there is currently mired in scandal involving the prosecutors, a continuing appellate effort to get the matter transferred to federal court, and extensive pretrial litigation. With the federal cases in such flux, and with the difficulty of scheduling a long trial potentially involving over a dozen defendants (and their busy lawyers), it’s impossible to say whether a Trump trial in Atlanta is in the cards this year.
We have never seen anything like 2024’s promised collision of electoral politics and high-stakes trials. I really hope we don’t see anything like it again.