A lawyer who quit Donald Trump’s legal team this week said Saturday that he decided to leave due to strategy disagreements with a close advisor to the former president.
Timothy Parlatore, who had been a key lawyer for Trump in the Justice Department’s special counsel investigation into the potential mishandling of classified documents at Trump’s Florida estate, told CNN in an interview on Saturday that there were “certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be.”
He singled out Boris Epshteyn, another lawyer and top Trump advisor in multiple criminal investigations, accusing him of “doing everything he could to try to block us, to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.”
Parlatore disclosed Wednesday that he was resigning from the Trump legal team, a move that comes as the investigation by special counsel Jack Smith shows signs of winding down and nearing a decision on whether or not to bring charges against the former president.
In a statement responding to Parlatore’s comments, a Trump spokesman said: “Mr. Parlatore is no longer a member of the legal team. His statements regarding current members of the legal team are unfounded and categorically false.”
In his interview, Parlatore said Epshteyn had served as a “filter,” preventing the legal team from getting information about the investigation to or from Trump.
He also said that Epshteyn had resisted the idea of the legal team organizing a search of Trump’s property in Bedminster, N.J., months ago for potential additional classified documents, and that he had impeded a defense strategy aimed at helping “educate [Atty. Gen.] Merrick Garland as to how best to handle this matter.”
Parlatore was one of the authors of a letter last month to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee that laid out a series of potential defenses in the investigation.
“It’s difficult enough fighting against [the Justice Department], and in this case a special counsel. But when you also have people within the tent that are also trying to undermine you, block you, [they] really make it so that I can’t do what I know that I need to do as a lawyer,” Parlatore said.
“When I am getting into fights like that, that’s detracting from what is necessary to defend the client and ultimately was not in the client’s best interest,” he added. “So I made the decision to withdraw.”
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