Why Doesn't Donald Trump Have Better Lawyers?

Some lawyers will refuse Donald Trump as a client because they risk losing other business, a former federal prosecutor has said.

Neama Rahmani was reacting to criticism of Trump's legal team, which has been hit by a string of losses in civil claims against him. It also follows criticism of Trump's attorney, Alina Habba, in the defamation case taken against him by retired journalist, E. Jean Carroll.

"Trump goes through lawyers like his daily Diet Cokes," Rahmani told Newsweek.

"First, Trump has a reputation for not paying his lawyers. And he is so toxic to half the population, that lawyers risk losing other business when they accept him as a client," he said.

Rahmani said that some skilled attorneys will also refuse to take Trump as a client because he is "impossible to control." "He'll give public statements that are used against him, attack his former lawyers like Michael Cohen, and even go after the judges in his trials."

Rahmani made his comments after Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina announced on January 15 that he would no longer represent Trump in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit and in the criminal case taken against Trump over alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

The former president, who is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, has also been found liable for fraud in a New York civil fraud case taken against him for exaggerating the value of his assets.

Rahmani, now the president of the West Coast Trial Lawyers law firm, said that some lawyers will distance themselves from Trump because his cases "are losers on the merits." "He's already been found liable for committing fraud in the civil fraud trial, and has been found to have sexually assaulted Jean Carroll in her second defamation trial. So it's not a question of if Trump will lose, but how much he will have to pay. There are many lawyers who, unsurprisingly, don't want to jump on those grenades," Rahmani said.

Former federal attorney Joyce Vance wrote in her blog, Civil Discourse, on January 18 that Alina Habba's lack of courtroom skills in the E. Jean Carroll case show that Trump cannot get a good lawyer.

"Today, her lack of courtroom experience was on full display. She failed to stand when addressing the Judge, and she failed to take her seat after he ruled—that's the stuff of trial advocacy 101," Vance wrote.

"I think her capabilities help us understand that Trump, who as a former president should have access to the finest lawyering the profession has to offer, does not. He is so toxic that most of the good lawyers won't touch him. It's shocking that a former president is represented by a lawyer who doesn't seem to know her way around a courtroom and continues to antagonize the Judge by violating his pre-trial rulings, especially since the lawyer on the other side is Roberta Kaplan (no relationship to the Judge), an A++ caliber lawyer."

In a jury trial in May, the former president was found liable for sexual assault and defamation of Carroll. The jury found that Trump sexually assaulted the former Elle writer in a Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in the 1990s and then defamed her character in 2022 by claiming the assault never happened because Carroll "wasn't my type."

She is suing again for comments he made in 2019, when she first launched her sexual assault claim against him.

In those 2019 comments, Trump falsely claimed that Carroll was "trying to sell a new book" and suggested she might be a Democratic operative.