'Silly': Legal expert says Trump knows his latest bid to get rid of judge is 'specious'

Donald Trump's legal team Wednesday sought to get the judge in E. Jean Carroll's case to recuse himself, but that effort was always doomed, an expert said.

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said Trump, who has made several failed attempts to ditch the judges in various cases, moved to recuse Judge Kaplan because he credited "one of Carroll’s lawyers’ representations that Trump, under the guise of talking with his counsel, was loudly proclaiming several of his defamatory statements to be true."

"That lawyer, they complained, once served as a law clerk to Judge Kaplan, a one-year tour of duty that by my count was well over a decade ago," noting that she witnessed the court interactions herself.

"I witnessed two of those episodes with my own eyes; despite sitting in the furthest right seat of the fourth row in the courtroom, I also heard Trump say, 'It’s true! That’s true!' when Carroll’s lawyers played a clip from the 5/10/23 CNN Town Hall, at which he said Carroll’s was 'a fake story, totally made up,'" according to Rubin.

More importantly, Rubin said, "that a judge must recuse himself because his former law clerk represents a party is specious."

"SDNY law clerks are overwhelmingly recent law school grads selected for one-year terms, after which most become NYC litigators," she said, speaking from personal experience. "How do I know? I was one."

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She continued:

"Moreover, most judges have their own policies about recusal when former law clerks appear in their cases. It is not unusual for a judge to recuse herself during a law clerk’s first 5 years of practice post-clerkship, but after a decade, especially when that judge has 2-3 clerks who turn over each year?" the lawyer questioned. "Precluding judges from hearing cases because a former clerk of one year now represents a party a decade or more later is silly. You know who also knows this? Trump."

Rubin further pointed out a hypocritical instance.

"In 2020, lawyer Patrick Strawbridge argued for Trump at the Supreme Court in the Mazars case, which dealt with House committees’ subpoenas for Trump’s tax and financial records. Strawbridge was a clerk to Justice Thomas in 2008-2009. Did Trump complain about recusal then?" Rubin asked. "Of course not. Strawbridge’s involvement no more demanded Thomas’s recusal than that of Kaplan’s former law clerk does in the E. Jean Carroll case."