Trump Shakes Up His Georgia Legal Team Ahead of
Atlanta Booking
Mr. Trump is hiring Steve Sadow, a veteran criminal
defense lawyer in Atlanta who has taken on a number of high-profile cases.
Richard
Fausset Maggie Haberman Danny Hakim
By Richard
Fausset, Maggie Haberman and Danny Hakim
Aug. 24,
2023
Updated
10:07 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/us/trump-georgia-lawyers.html
Just before
his visit to an Atlanta jail to be booked on 13 felony counts, Donald J. Trump
has shaken up his Georgia legal defense team, adding Steve Sadow, a veteran
criminal defense lawyer who has taken on a number of high-profile cases.
Mr. Trump’s
decision comes soon after one of his lawyers, Drew Findling, and his two other
lawyers in the Georgia case, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg, negotiated a
$200,000 bond for Mr. Trump, who is one of 19 defendants in a sweeping
racketeering indictment charging them with engaging in a “criminal enterprise”
that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.
Mr.
Findling is expected to be let go, according to a person familiar with the
matter, while Ms. Little will be retained.
Mr. Sadow
said in a statement that Mr. Trump “should never have been indicted, adding,
“He is innocent of all the charges brought against him.”
He added
that “prosecutions intended to advance or serve the ambitions and careers of
political opponents of the president have no place in our justice system.”
The
shake-up was first reported by ABC News.
On
Thursday, Mr. Trump is expected to surrender at the Fulton County Jail in
Atlanta, where he is likely to be fingerprinted and photographed, the protocol
for all criminal defendants in the county. Supporters of Mr. Trump began
arriving early in the morning to demonstrate in front of the jail; by 9:30
a.m., dozens of people were there, carrying signs and shouting slogans.
Rick Hearn,
44, an Atlanta accountant, displayed a poster with an image of Mr. Trump next
to one of Nelson Mandela, with the title “political prisoners.”
“I feel
like I needed to be a part of this,” Mr. Hearn said, adding that “those in
charge” need to know that they could not “take away our rights and get away
with it.”
The Georgia
indictment, released last week, is the fourth criminal case against Mr. Trump
to be filed this year. It targets not just Mr. Trump, but also an array of his
allies who are accused of engaging in election interference after the November
2020 vote. The defendants include both little-known supporters of Mr. Trump and
high-profile political players like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former
lawyer, and Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff.
As of
Thursday morning, nearly half of the 19 defendants had been booked at the jail,
and a cascade of legal maneuvering was underway. Three defendants are seeking
to remove their cases to federal court: Mr. Meadows; Jeffrey Clark, a former
Justice Department official; and David Shafer, a former head of the Georgia
Republican Party.
A fourth
criminal case. Former President Donald Trump was indicted for a fourth time on
Aug. 14, this time over what prosecutors in Atlanta described as his efforts to
unlawfully undo his election loss in Georgia in 2020. The indictment includes
13 charges against Trump, as well as charges against 18 of his allies. Here are
some key takeaways:
Trump was
charged under Georgia’s RICO Act. Prosecutors charged Trump and his allies
under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, which
allows them to link various crimes committed by different people by arguing
that they were acting together for a common criminal goal. At its heart, the
statute requires prosecutors to prove the existence of an “enterprise” and a
“pattern of racketeering activity.”
The charges
reach far beyond Trump. Among the 18 Trump allies charged in the case are
Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and lawyer for Trump, and Mark
Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Also charged are several more
lawyers who are accused of working to try to overturn the election, including
John Eastman and Sidney Powell.
The charges
fall into several baskets. Several of the individual counts stem from false
claims of election fraud that Giuliani and two other Trump lawyers made at
legislative hearings in December 2020. Another batch of charges concerns a plan
to vote for a false slate of pro-Trump electors. A third raft of charges
accuses several Trump allies of conspiring to steal voter data and tamper with
voting equipment in Coffee County, Ga.
The
district attorney gave Trump 10 days to turn himself in. Fani Willis, the
district attorney who led the lengthy investigation, gave Trump until noon on
Aug. 25 to surrender in Fulton County, where he would be arraigned on the
charges and enter a plea. The Fulton County sheriff said he expected that Trump
would be booked in the same way as any other defendant. Trump said he would
turn himself in on Aug. 24.
Another
defendant, Kenneth Chesebro, filed a speedy-trial demand on Wednesday. Under
that scenario, which Georgia law allows, the trial for all 19 people indicted
in the case would have to start no later than Nov. 3 — months earlier than
prosecutors had sought.
Given all
the pretrial wrangling that must be resolved, the ultimate timing of a trial or
trials remains up in the air.
The office
of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, is prosecuting the
case. Her office has requested that arraignments take place in the week of
Sept. 5. Defendants have the right to waive appearing at an arraignment, where
defendants answer the charges against them.
Abruptly
reconfiguring his legal team is more of a feature than a bug for Mr. Trump. He
has cycled through scores of lawyers over his decades in the New York real
estate world and in his more recent political career. In some instances, he has
been known to refuse to pay lawyers for their work, although those who are
working for him in connection with the four criminal cases that he now faces
are being paid.
Mr. Trump
has not paid them with his personal funds, but using donations his supporters
made in the wake of the 2020 election, after he said that he needed help to
pursue claims of widespread voting fraud — claims that were widely debunked.
Recently, a
number of lawyers working on Mr. Trump’s behalf have faced their own legal
troubles, particularly in connection with the indictment in Georgia.
Mr. Sadow,
who keeps a modest office on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta, is
considered by many people in the city’s legal community to be among its most
talented criminal defense lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a city that is the
putative hip-hop capital of the world, Mr. Sadow, like Mr. Findling, has
represented rap clients, including T.I., Rick Ross and Gunna, as well as the
singer Usher.
Mr. Sadow
has been involved in another high profile racketeering case. In December,
Gunna, whose real name is Sergio Kitchens, pleaded guilty to a racketeering
charge in the sprawling Fulton County gang case against Young Slime Life, or
YSL, an Atlanta hip-hop collective founded by the superstar rapper Jeffery
Williams, who performs as Young Thug. As part of his plea, Mr. Kitchens, who
was represented by Mr. Sadow, admitted that YSL is also a criminal street gang,
according to a spokesman for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.
Mr.
Kitchens, as part of the agreement, entered what is known as an Alford plea,
which allows defendants to maintain their innocence while pleading guilty. He
was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released after one year of the
sentence was commuted to time served and the rest was suspended.
Other
high-profile clients of Mr. Sadow have included Howard K. Stern, the boyfriend
of Anna Nicole Smith, who was accused of taking part in a conspiracy to provide
her with prescription drugs before her death; Mr. Stern’s conviction in the
case was ultimately overturned.
More than
two decades ago, Mr. Sadow was a fixture in news reports about a scandal
involving an Atlanta strip club called the Gold Club, which, according to
federal prosecutors, had ties to the Gambino crime family of New York and was a
den of prostitution and grift.
Mr. Sadow
represented the club’s owner, Steven E. Kaplan, in that case. In a deal with
prosecutors, Mr. Kaplan pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering and agreed
to forfeit $5 million to the government and spend three to five years in
prison. The case sputtered out as other defendants pleaded guilty to lesser
charges; Mr. Sadow, at the time, called the plea agreement “a very good deal
for all concerned.”
When Mr.
Trump chose Mr. Findling last summer to head his Georgia legal defense team, it
made some sense, given Mr. Trump’s experience in the world of pop culture and
his affinity for oversized personalities. Mr. Findling, who is often
photographed wearing stylish sunglasses, refers to himself as the
#BillionDollarLawyer on Instagram, and has represented rappers including Cardi
B, Gucci Mane and Migos.
He has a
reputation as a skilled lawyer who has taken on cases ranging from high-profile
murders to local political corruption scandals.
Before he
was hired, Mr. Findling had sharply criticized Mr. Trump numerous times on
social media. In 2018, he referred to Mr. Trump as “the racist architect of
fraudulent Trump University.”
But once he
was hired, Mr. Findling delivered a vigorous defense of Mr. Trump. Before the
former president’s indictment last week, Mr. Findling and his team filed a
number of motions seeking to throw out evidence collected by a special grand
jury, and to have Ms. Willis taken off the case.
His
strategy was seen by many legal observers as aggressive but worth attempting,
though it wore on the patience of the presiding judge and ultimately proved
futile. Courts ruled that Mr. Trump lacked legal standing to bring such
challenges because he had not yet been charged at that time.
Like Mr.
Findling, Mr. Sadow has publicly expressed misgivings about Mr. Trump. On the
way to taking a swipe at the former F.B.I. director James Comey in one 2017
exchange on Twitter, Mr. Sadow made a point of noting that he was “not a DT
supporter.”
Sean Keenan
and Christian Boone contributed reporting.
Richard
Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the
American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal
justice. He previously worked at The Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign
correspondent in Mexico City. More about Richard Fausset
Maggie
Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man:
The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team
that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers
and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Danny Hakim
is an investigative reporter. He has been a European economics correspondent
and bureau chief in Albany and Detroit. He was also a lead reporter on the team
awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. More about Danny
Hakim
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