Trump’s Legal Team Shrinks

When Donald Trump first hired an elite legal team at Sullivan & Cromwell early last year, it included five of the firm’s partners, all of whom had clerked for Supreme Court justices and one of whom had served as acting solicitor general.

Today, all but one is gone.

Since April, four of the five members of Trump’s defense team have exited the firm, either to rival shops or because the president elevated them to positions in his administration or the judiciary.

That leaves Sullivan & Cromwell co-chair Robert Giuffra Jr. as the single partner responsible for leading Trump’s defense in a smattering of high-profile appeals, including an attempt to shed the president’s criminal conviction.

In July, Giuffra was the sole signatory from Sullivan & Cromwell, aside from a junior-level lawyer, on a petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn an $83.3 million jury award resulting from a defamation lawsuit filed by the writer E. Jean Carroll. The petition was also signed by a lawyer for a Missouri-based boutique law firm that has defended Trump in the past.

In addition to the Carroll appeal, which has sparked backlash among some of the firm’s partners, Sullivan & Cromwell is also handling Trump’s appeal of his criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush money case and his appeal of a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

It would be unusual for Giuffra, who has a roster of major litigation clients as well as co-chair duties, to handle all three appeals on his own.

A person familiar with the firm’s staffing, who was granted anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said Sullivan & Cromwell plans to add partners to Trump’s team in the next two weeks, by the time it is scheduled to file a brief in Trump’s appeal of the civil fraud case Aug. 26. It is due to file a brief in the appeal of Trump’s New York criminal conviction in October.

A representative for Sullivan & Cromwell did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s hiring of Sullivan & Cromwell — and the five-partner team in particular — at the start of his second term marked a notable shift in the relationship between the white-shoe legal community and the president, who had previously struggled to secure such elite representation.

And while some lawyers who represented Trump in the past saw their reputations or careers damaged by their association with him, that isn’t the case for the four who left his team.

Trump named Jamie McDonald, the former enforcement director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as the Manhattan U.S. attorney. McDonald started the job in late July after being appointed by the district’s judges. And Trump nominated Matthew Schwartz to a lifetime position as an appellate judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. He was confirmed by the Senate in mid-July.

The others defected to a rival firm, Gibson Dunn. Jeff Wall, the former acting solicitor general, and Morgan Ratner, an experienced Supreme Court litigator, made the switch in April.

Ratner declined to comment. Wall didn’t respond to a request for comment.