Trump’s former key attorney says he left because of legal team infighting

Washington
CNN
—

Donald Trump’s former attorney Timothy Parlatore, who quit the former president’s legal team earlier this week, said on Saturday he left due to infighting within the group.

“It had nothing to do with the case itself or the client,” Parlatore told CNN’s Paula Reid on “Newsroom.”

“The real reason is that there are certain people who have made defending the president much more difficult than necessary. In particular, there is an individual who works for him, Boris Epshteyn, who had really done everything to try to block – to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.

In response, a Trump spokesperson told CNN, “Mr. Parlatore is no longer on the legal team. His statements regarding the current members of the legal team are unfounded and categorically false.

Parlatore played a key role in the investigation of the Mar-a-Lago documents and organized searches for additional classified documents last year at several Trump properties and a storage unit in Florida.

He also testified in December before a grand jury in the Mar-a-Lago case as Trump’s team and the Justice Department were embroiled in a dispute in which the DOJ sought unsuccessfully to scorn the former President for not handing over all classified documents. after receiving a subpoena in May 2022.

Parlatore said on Saturday that Epshteyn “served as a sort of filter to stop us from passing information to the client… In my opinion, he wasn’t being very honest with us or with the client about certain things.”

“There were certain things like the searches that he tried to interfere with, and then more recently as we come to the end of this investigation where (special counsel) Jack Smith and eventually Merrick Garland are going to make a decision. as to what to do – while we were setting up our defense strategy to help educate Merrick Garland on how best to handle this case, he was preventing us from committing to that strategy,” Parlatore said.

Epshteyn is a lawyer and adviser to Trump, who first joined his orbit as a special assistant.

He then advised Trump during the 2020 campaign and has remained close to him since leaving office. Epshteyn was involved in Trump’s legal response to federal investigations into the former president, and he appeared at Trump’s arraignment in New York last month, although he was not one of the attorneys of the case.