When a liberal power lawyer represents the Trump family, things can get ugly
"Four decades ago, soon after a president of the United States interfered in an investigation of his actions, a young lawyer named Jamie Gorelick was assigned her first big case. Gorelick, raised in a liberal Long Island household, would defend Richard Nixon as he fought the government’s efforts to control his White House papers.
The work was exhilarating. But there she was, an activist for women’s rights working for a president she had fought against, a president her friends considered beyond the pale. When Nixon came to her firm’s office and offered to have his picture taken with the attorneys working on his case, Gorelick made herself scarce.
Four decades later, Gorelick, now one of Washington’s most prominent lawyers, once again represents famous clients who symbolize much of what she and her friends have spent their lives working against. When Gorelick signed up Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump — the president’s close advisers, as well as his son-in-law and daughter — as clients, she knew her friends might raise their collective eyebrows. She didn’t know that some of them would call her a turncoat.
For generations, the premier D.C. lawyer-fixers were lions of the bar, permanent power players in a city where influence can vanish in a moment. Men such as Clark Clifford, A.B. Culvahouse Jr., Edward Bennett Williams, Howard Baker, Lloyd Cutler and Robert Strauss smoothly glided across the great divide, amassing thoroughly bipartisan client rosters.
But now Gorelick, one of the first women to join that elite club of lawyers, finds herself under attack for taking on a share of the Trump family’s legal woes. Whether that reflects the cynicism and polarization of the times, or results from the particular antagonism between the Trumps and the city they promised to drain, the reaction has been painful.
In the most public slap, Hilary Rosen, a prominent Democratic strategist and lobbyist, tweeted, “Hey Jamie Gorelick, you’ve just poured that ‘Complicit’ perfume on yourself,” a reference to a “Saturday Night Live” parody ad that imagined an Ivanka Trump-branded scent. (Rosen declined to elaborate on the tweet, saying only, “It is what it is.”)"
............
“For the first time, Jamie’s getting irrational criticism from her fellow liberals, who think that if you represent anyone associated with the other side, you must be a Republican in hiding,” said Alan Dershowitz, Gorelick’s mentor at Harvard Law School and a friend ever since. “Jamie is obviously a liberal Democrat, but this is not a betrayal. Jamie is being patriotic and heroic and consistent with the best traditions of the bar. We have to resist zealotry on both sides.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/when-a-liberal-power-lawyer-represents-the-trump-family-things-can-get-ugly/2017/06/11/2af453e4-4b88-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_gorelick-830pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.40b66a35cd69
So Mr. Grandstander Dershowitz is telling us "we have to resist zealotry on both sides?
We already know Dershowitz has no problem defending a racist, sexist, and xenophobe, because that is what he has been doing since trump and company have been sworn in.
This isn't a case of a public defender being compelled to take on a client. This also isn't someone who is destitute and needs the money.
= new reply since forum marked as read
