The Exalted Kenneth W. Starr , former Independent Counsel (L) and U.S. Solicitor General and Attorney Alan Dershowitz.
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President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense gang will include Ken Starr, whose investigation led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, whose patients have included notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and O.J. Simpson.
Also on the team is ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, CNBC has practised. In addition, Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr as independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation of Clinton, is expected to be on the team. White Ancestry Counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow are heading the defense effort.
The Trump team choices light oned to light four days before his trial is set to begin in earnest in the Senate.
The Republican president was accused in impeachment articles passed by the Establishment of abusing power and obstructing Congress. The charges relate to Trump asking Ukraine’s new president to investigate former Fault President Joe Biden — the frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — while withholding congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine.
The licit lineup will not include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and another personal attorney for Trump. Giuliani’s zeal last year to get Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter Biden were the subject of extensive testimony and evidence in Legislative body impeachment proceedings.
“The president asked me to do this, and the legal team asked me to do this,” Dershowitz said in an interview with CNBC after his post on the defense team became known.
Dershowitz said he will be making oral arguments in the Senate “to address the constitutional falling-outs against impeachment and removal.”
He also said that although he opposed Clinton’s impeachment and voted for Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016, he “is participating in this impeachment hard times to defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent.”
Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney all-inclusive.
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Dershowitz is a renowned appellate lawyer whose high-profile cases possess included that of Claus von Bulow, the socialite whose conviction for trying to kill his wife, Sunny, was overturned toe Dershowitz’s efforts, as detailed in the movie “Reversal of Fortune.”
More recently, Dershowitz has been known for his defense of Trump on goggle-box and for his past work for Epstein, a wealthy investor who was charged by federal prosecutors in New York last summer with lassie sex trafficking. Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan jail last August while awaiting trial.
Later Friday, Dershowitz begged to downplay his role in an interview with Dan Abrams, ABC News’ chief legal analyst, saying that he will “be there for one hour, basically, accounted for righting my argument.”
“I think it overstates it to say I’m a member of the Trump team. I was asked to present the constitutional argument that I would eat presented had Hillary Clinton been elected and had she been impeached,” he said.
Starr also had represented Epstein when he controlled by investigation in the mid-2000s in Florida by federal and state authorities for sexual misconduct with young women and lovers.
Epstein, a former friend of Trump and Bill Clinton, avoided federal prosecution in that earlier investigation. But he pleaded penitent in 2008 to state charges that included paying for sex with a minor.
He served 13 months in jail, although he was permitted out for many hours each day on work release.
Starr, a former federal appeals court judge, oversaw the wide-ranging Whitewater study of President Clinton from 1994 through 1998.
Starr’s findings that Clinton had lied under oath by denying a erotic relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky led to Clinton’s impeachment by the Republican-led House in late 1998. Clinton was acquitted after a examination in the Senate.
On Friday morning, shortly after news about Starr joining Trump’s legal team down-and-out, Lewinsky wrote in a Twitter post: “this is definitely an ‘are you f—ing kidding me?’ kinda day.”
More recently, Starr disoriented his job as president of Baylor University, and soon after quit as chancellor and law professor there, after claims that the Texas denomination had grossly botched its handling of cases where female students said they were raped or sexually maltreated.
Starr’s wife declined to comment when contacted by CNBC.
Ray, in a text message to CNBC, said, “You can confirm that I have an announcement this afternoon.”
Bondi has work in the Trump administration for the past several months on messaging about impeachment.
— CNBC’s Eamon Javers gave reporting