Trump Learns the Hard Way: Free Advice is Worth What You Paid For It
Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Everyone knows people hate lawyers. What do you call 10 million lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start. Hardy har. We lawyer folk like to retort that you only hate us until you need us. That’s sort of true, but I would tweak that a bit: You hate us until we help you get a good result. I’ve had plenty of clients who needed me but definitely did not like me, and it was almost always because I had to tell them something that was not what they wanted to hear. Lawyers have to do that sometimes. No, sorry, I don’t think the judge will give you full custody because your ex has a new girlfriend. No, your case won’t be dismissed because you weren’t read your rights as they slapped on the cuffs. No, the classified government documents do not belong to you and you can’t keep them.
OK, I’ve never had to advise a client of that last one, but I hear some lawyers did. Their client, as it turns out, did not listen.
Former President Donald Trump repeatedly rejected his attorneys’ attempts to see him return classified documents and minimize the legal fallout after he absconded to his private club in Florida with the sensitive material when he left the White House in 2021, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The Post, citing seven advisers to the former president, said Trump was extraordinarily stubborn when it came to negotiating with government officials. When one of his attorneys, Christopher Kise, suggested meeting with the Justice Department to negotiate a settlement that could avoid charges, Trump reportedly rejected that plan. Instead, he listened to the advice of Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who told him he could keep the documents and that he should fight Justice Department efforts to see them returned.
That’s some terrible legal advice. Mr. Fitton should face some legal malpractice charges, right? Except for the fact that he is not a practicing attorney. Nor is he even a law school graduate. Nor did he ever go to law school. Fitton has a bachelors degree in English, and has made a name for himself as a Pro-Trump, election fraud propounding talking head. He makes his living from extreme “conservative” outrage. So why was Trump citing Fitton when he argued with his lawyers about cooperating with the FBI? Simple: Fitton was telling Trump what he wanted to hear.
Trump did not want to admit that he should not have taken these documents when he vacated the White House, nor did he want to hand them over. He treated the presidency as an extension of his personal brand and believed those papers to be his property. Accustomed as he is to sycophants around him, he was more inclined to listen to Fitton than to his actual legally educated, expensive (if he actually paid them) lawyers, who were trying to keep him out of criminal trouble. And how is that working out for him?
I have had no shortage of clients telling me “what the law says”, based on what they heard from TV shows, their fellow inmates, and, most frequently, their mamas. Without fail, the “advice” they cling to is in their favor. No one has ever threatened to fire me as their counsel because I painted too rosy a picture of the likely outcome of their case. That’s human nature.
And sure, there are bad lawyers out there giving bad advice. I don’t deny that. I’ve actually been wrong myself maybe once or twice. But Trump had multiple lawyers telling him what he needed to do to try to save his skin, and he disregarded all of them in favor of the one person who was telling him what he wanted to hear. You’d expect better judgment from a man who once held arguably the most powerful position in the world – well, normally you would, but in this case it is thoroughly unsurprising.
Let’s pretend for a minute this wasn’t a person who should have known better, but rather Joe P. Citizen who found himself in a quagmire with serious legal implications. Imagine he is being urged to ignore the advice of his actual legal counsel by someone with a stake not in Joe’s best interest but in the furtherance of his own personal interests. This would be an outrage to anyone who cared about Joe. Alas, it is hard for many to muster up that kind of outrage on Trump’s behalf; on the contrary, it has likely produced a hearty laugh or dose of schadenfreude for his opponents. For those who do feel outrage, it is probably directed not at Fitton, the Charlatan whose whispers in Trump’s ear have possibly contributed to his current situation, but at the prosecutors and the justice system for not giving Trump a pass on his alleged illegal actions.
There is a reason it is illegal to practice law without a license, and it’s not merely gatekeeping as some may claim. Legal matters are often complex and nuanced and the system is not user-friendly. A competent lawyer is often the only thing standing between a person and their personal or financial ruin. Unfortunately, merely offering opinion and advice, as Fitton has apparently done, is not likely to fall under the unlicensed practice of law. He has a right to say what he wants to his pal Donald, so long as he is not representing it as legal advice, charging for it as such, or presenting himself to a court as an attorney. The only consequence Fitton will face is another reason to shake his fist on Fox News, railing against the persecution of Trump he helped to bring about.
Your mom, or your favorite “conservative watchdog,” can tell you all day long that you’re a good boy who did nothing wrong. But if your lawyer says you’re in trouble but here’s how we can mitigate it, you should think carefully about whose advice you take.
My only quibble with your excellent analysis is you used Donald Trump and think carefully in the same post. We have a plethora of data telling us that doesn’t work as a construct.Report
There are a lot of ways to describe Donald Trump, but few of them are truer than “dipshit”.Report
Em writes of criminal defendant clients clinging desperately to wish-it-were-true advice from non-lawyer “advisors” like fellow inmates, moms, etc. I have had cognate experiences in my civil employment litigation practice. I believe I’ve told the story here on these pages of this blog how much of my time and effort is spent urging people to make “toilets or ice cream choices” when people insist on choosing “toilets,” frequently at the urging of non-lawyers (in my case, it’s very often a spouse) dispensing ill-informed “advice” or sometimes woefully incomplete autodidacticism (“I did my own research”) to reject favorable settlement proposals. I’m sure other practitioners in other disciplines have similar stories as well.
What matters is that the advice is pleasing to the client and therefore they want to believe it’s true. When this impulse takes control of the client’s decision-making matrix, it often takes drastic efforts on the part of the attorney to make them act in their own best interests. Like “If you don’t follow my advice, I have to withdraw as your lawyer.” In my experience, that mostly does the trick, and gets the client to ruefully and reluctantly choose “eating ice cream” over “cleaning toilets.”
Donald Trump, however, is a victim not only of his own ego but his own charisma. He will never want for attorneys who will take him on as a client and who will subordinate their own advice to advice conforming to his desires. He has found that switching lawyers causes delay and chaos and sometimes, favorable things result from delay and chaos. Attorneys who assert themselves against his will at critical times wind up being fired, publicly maligned, and stiffed for their fees, so it’s not hard to understand how competent counsel might be in short supply for TFG.
But my point here is that Trump may well be a client for whom a lawyer’s usual methods of asserting herself to force the client to act in his own self-interest will not be particularly effective.Report
How can you find out which people in Washington congress have used the slush fund for payoffs? This should be made public maybe through the Freedom of Liberation act!Report