On Wednesday, Trump lawyer Will Scharf found himself tongue-tied after a simple question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
Collins asked Scharf, also a Republican candidate in the Missouri race for attorney general, “You’re a lawyer, obviously: you already got a legal retainer that was raised for hundreds of thousands of dollars?”
The reference to Donald Trump’s hush money case caught Scharf off guard, and he struggled to come up with an answer.
“Uh-uh-uh, I mean, I’ve gotten paid for legal services in a variety of ways before: contingency fees, hourly fees,” Scharf said. “I think different people come to different agreements.”
But Collins wasn’t finished. “Have you ever been paid a certain amount, say $100,000, that you paid in billable hours and received $330,000?” she asked.
Scharf still needed to organize his thoughts. “Kaitlan, respectfully, the issue here is that the payments are incidental to the case the prosecution is trying to prove and that refers to the records of the payments, not the payments themselves,” he said. “Refunding hush money for hush money – none of this is a crime.”
The exchange is revealing. Although Scharf is not part of the Trump hush money case, he, thanks to his legal knowledge, clearly has difficulty justifying Trump’s actions. Trump is accused of 34 criminal charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime, using her former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pay the adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair before the 2016 presidential election. Trump made the “stacked” payments to Cohen to reimburse him for paying Daniels and to avoid taxes and scrutiny. Cohen a testimony made it clear that Trump was involved in every stage of the alleged crime. If the Republican presidential candidate is found guilty in the case, how will his lawyers and surrogates justify it?
