Jay Sekulow via Twitter
If you watched any of the Sunday morning talk shows, you probably saw Trump attorney Jay Sekulow — because he was on all of them — explaining away the meeting that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort held with Natalia Veselnitskaya and, apparently, Rinat Akhmetshin. According to Sekulow, the hubbub over the meeting could only be #FakeNews because the Secret Service wouldn’t have let it take place if it were improper.[1]
Within minutes, social media lit up with sources pointing out that the Secret Service doesn’t perform any such service, a damning indictment one-upped by the revelation that the Service wasn’t even on Trump Jr. at the time. For anyone bothering to stay even a little informed, Sekulow’s appearances came off as buffoonery on parade.
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But what if that’s the whole point? While most of us wonder how an attorney could go on television and marry his client to such a flimsy, easily disproven defense, it’s just possible that Sekulow’s playing the con perfectly.
Sekulow doesn’t defend Jr., Kushner, or Manafort. But, as we’ve been saying for months, this is a white-collar matter, and like most white-collar matters, attorneys need to begin from the premise that every friend or family member as a trusted partner… and also a potential lump underneath the proverbial bus. “Mr. Trump knew nothing of the meeting, and relied only on the reports he received from people he had no reason to distrust” is a perfectly fine answer. Making up a phantom Secret Service vetting process is not. The former forces the Three Stooges to come up with their own defense, but it also doesn’t put them in a bad spot by suggesting Trump’s team still has no idea what that defense even is — kind of like they don’t have one. The latter also highlights that Trump the Elder, the man ultimately responsible for the actions of his campaign, acted negligently at best. That’s not a good look.
So is he a bad lawyer? True, like Marc Kasowitz, Sekulow is defending Trump in a white-collar case despite a profound lack of white-collar experience. And, yes, Sekulow’s legal career consists in large part to running a charity to buy very nice toys for himself. And one would hope any good lawyer could intervene with their client before he starts Tweeting this stuff around:
Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That's politics!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2017
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Still, that any attorney would go on television so ill-prepared that he’d do this kind of damage to his client and his cronies strains credulity. Vast white-collar experience isn’t necessary to understand that this is a high-stakes representation and prepare accordingly.
On the other hand, is it even possible that this guy is just putting on a show? As Nick Confessore tweeted this morning, what people don’t get about Trump’s political strategy is that “the performance *is* the accomplishment, the deliverable, the policy win.” Perhaps that’s all Sekulow is, a walking Trump tweet wrapped in a law degree. His role is performance. To force everyone to spin around distracted by how foolish his lawyer sounds, while Trump rests on his own confidence that the force of the backlash will feed his narrative that the media are shrill and out to get him, and if that fails, then at the very worst no one will ever care what Sekulow said in July.
For example, read that Trump Tweet above. Remember when the defense was “we were just meeting about adoptions”?
It may not be designed to please real lawyers, but so far everything about this weekend’s snafu is going according to that plan. But of course to believe Jay Sekulow is a master showman, one would have to dismiss all those videos of his rock band.
That’s not so easy.
Secret Service dismisses Trump lawyer’s claim about Russia meeting [ABC News]
Earlier: Jay Sekulow’s Made Millions From His Charity And That Has A Lot Of Experts Very Concerned
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[1] It’s a fascinating strategy coming at the exact moment that the Trump messaging gurus are blasting the “deep state” — a shadowy cabal of unelected officials supposedly to blame for Trump’s inability to accomplish anything. The idea that the Secret Service acts as a gatekeeper for who people get to meet with would be real “deep state” stuff.
Joe Patrice is an 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 if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.