Pardon me?
The post Tom Goldstein Hires Trump’s Lawyers In First Good Bet In Years appeared first on Above the Law.
Where does one turn if you’re a prominent defendant who allegedly lost massive amounts of money on poorly conceived bets, engaged in false bookkeeping, misled lending banks, while paying off the multiple women he had affairs with?
The correct answer is Donald Trump’s defense team, whose client managed to embody ALL of that criminal activity (and more!) and slide right out of it unscathed. And sucking up to lawyers with the president’s ear when it comes time to beg for a pardon is at least as useful as writing an obsequious essay in the New York Times about winning Wisconsin being basically the same as an acquittal.
Supreme Court litigator and SCOTUSblog co-founder Tom Goldstein found himself on the wrong end of a harsh criminal indictment yesterday. The allegations of high stakes gambling, $15+ million in personal debts, and paying four mistresses from the firm coffers approached “Wayne Brady on Chappelle’s Show” levels of surprising pimp turns. Josh Blackman has a piece in the Volokh Conspiracy today comparing Goldstein’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court with the timeline of the indictment and suggests that he was losing millions and then turning around and arguing twice before the Supreme Court in the course of a month all while juggling multiple relationships and, folks, this is what peak performance looks like.
Facing all these charges, the self-professed Democrat — as of his NYT essay arguing that the criminal justice system should yield to the electoral college — ran right to Trump’s team.
Lauro and Kise, probably the only personal Trump lawyers who aren’t expected to take over the Justice Department, successfully ran out the clock on Trump’s various criminal cases. While Kise stumbled in the New York hush money case, it didn’t matter when the court sentenced Trump to the criminal justice equivalent of a divorced dad handing his kid two bottles of Jack and the keys to his car. Meanwhile, in the D.C. interference case, the Supreme Court delivered a solid for the team in rewriting the Constitution to retroactively legalize coups and in the Florida classified documents case Aileen Cannon did Aileen Cannon stuff. All in all, a pretty successful run.
Which is not necessarily a knock on their lawyering skills in a straight up litigation — it’s comically clear Kise wasn’t in full control of the New York case — but as they say, good lawyers know the law and great lawyers know someone with federal pardon power.
Making this — if the indictment is to be believed — the best bet Goldstein’s made in awhile.
Earlier: SCOTUSblog Founder Indicted In Wild Poker-Fueled Tax Case
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
