"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Thinking about what he’s done, or not.By Mike Segar/Reuters.
When Lexington Avenue lothario Rudy Giuliani declared last month that he would be joining Donald Trump’s august legal team, he said that he would only be taking a “leave of absence” from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, because it’d take just a week, two weeks tops, to resolve the Mueller investigation. On Thursday, though, the law firm announced that the leave of absence has, sadly, become permanent, with Giuliani tendering a “resignation” letter on Wednesday. “After recognizing that this work is all consuming and is lasting longer than initially anticipated, Rudy has determined it is best for him to resign,” the firm’s chairman, Richard A. Rosenbaum, said in a statement. So that’s the party line. More likely, as others have speculated, “America’s Mayor” was told he had 24 hours to cough up a letter announcing his departure, or the firm would cough it up for him.
Greenberg Traurig might have seen this one coming. For starters, any lawyer worth their salt could have told Giuliani that defending the president of the United States in an investigation into possible collusion with a foreign power couldn’t be a side hustle. Second, no one outside of Giuliani actually thought that the Mueller case was going to wrap up in two weeks, or even a month. Perhaps Giuliani’s former bosses would even have granted him a sabbatical, and then allowed him back, if the words coming out of his mouth since joining Team Trump hadn’t become so thoroughly mortifying by association. While Giuliani has said a number of cringe-worthy things since joining Trump’s legal team—that he fantasizes about riding to Ivanka Trump’srescue; that it would have been really bad if the Stormy Daniels story got out a month before the election, etc.—perhaps the most embarrassing was his appearance on Sean Hannity, wherein he implied any lawyer worth his salt has pulled a Michael Cohen.
At his law firm, the sentient denture suggested, such payments porn-star payouts were standard practice. “That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm funds,” Giuliani said. Cohen, he added, “would take care of things like this like I take care of this with my clients.” You can see how Greenberg Traurig might have come to the conclusion that Giuliani was not the ideal advertisement for the firm.
Indeed, according to The New York Times, they were not pleased at all. “Firm partners . . . chafed over Mr. Giuliani’s public comments about [the] payments,” write reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. They were particularly displeased by the implication, which Giuliani spake as gospel, that it’s perfectly normal for a lawyer to secretly take the initiative to silence the porn stars who say they banged their clients. At least not without informing their client first. “We cannot speak for Mr. Giuliani with respect to what was intended by his remarks,” Jill Perry, a spokesperson for the firm, told the paper. “Speaking for ourselves, we would not condone payments of the nature alleged to have been made or otherwise without the knowledge and direction of a client.”
Also likely playing into Greenberg Traurig’s decision to happily part ways with ole Rudy? The fact that in his short time representing Trump, he’s made a name for himself as one of the worst lawyers of all time, so comically bad that even Donald Trump, Mr. Incompetent, can’t believe what a terrible job he’s doing. Those sorts of reviews are typically seen as a negative for companies advertising their legal services.
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Pharma giant: In retrospect, we probably should not have agreed to pay the president’s “fixer” $1.2 million for dubious consulting work
Novartis AG “made a mistake” in striking a deal with Michael Cohen through his shell company, Essential Consultants, for guidance “as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. healthcare-policy matters,” the firm’s C.E.O. toldemployees an e-mail today. “As a consequence, [we] are being criticized by a world that expects more from us.” Vasant Narasimhan did not say if the mistake specifically was agreeing to pay someone $1.2 million before holding a single meeting with him, or if the whole thing in general was one giant mistake, but presumably it’s the latter.
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You heard it months ago at “Courtside.” I said that Stormy D was smarter, more credible, more decent, and probably a better overall self-promoter than “Don the Con” and predicted that her lawyers would run circles around the 21st Century version of “The Three Stooges” hired by him.
To date, nothing to show I was wrong. Actually, I think I underestimated the incompetence of the Trump Legal Team. But, when everything the client says is a lie, and he can’t keep them straight, it’s hard for those around him to figure out which lies are part of the “party line” and which are . . . well, just plain old lies.
