The internal frustrations within Donald Trump's legal team started almost immediately after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago last year, and they spilled into public view not long afterward.
Federal investigators seized 101 classified materials from the former president's private residence in August, and his four-person legal team at the time -- Jim Trusty, Evan Corcoran, Chris Kise and Lindsey Halligan -- worked together to persuade U.S. district court judge Aileen Cannon to grant a special master, but cracks soon emerged, reported The Guardian.
"But Trusty, who played a leading role in the special master litigation, was already frustrated with how things were going," reported Hugo Lowell for the newspaper. "Trusty’s private frame of mind emerged over dinner with Halligan and Corcoran at the five-star Breakers hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida, hours after the special master court hearing.
"The conversation was overheard by this Guardian reporter who happened to be sitting at the table next to them."
Trusty was frustrated that Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn was making the attorneys run legal decisions through him, even though he didn't consider him to be a trial lawyer, and Trusty didn't like that Epshteyn seemed to focus more on Trump's public-relations problems than legal issues.
Lowell then overheard the attorney rip Epshteyn for trying to "troubleshoot" legal problems instead of letting him candidly brief his own client himself, which he compared to "'Game of Thrones' nonsense," and Trusty and Parlatore agreed several weeks later, after the Justice Department told them they believed Trump still had classified documents, that Epshteyn improperly inserted himself into their work.
"The pair chafed that when they spoke to Trump on the phone, Epshteyn was typically also on the line," Lowell reported. "At other times, they sniped that Epshteyn would give overly rosy outlooks to Trump and, in March, traveled to Mar-a-Lago to seek Trump’s permission to exclude him from future deliberations."
