James Trusty, an attorney representing former President Donald Trump regarding his alleged mishandling of classified documents, didn’t condemn his client calling out the wife and daughter of the judge overseeing his criminal trial in Manhattan over a hush money payment.
Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, appearing before Judge Juan Merchan, who also oversaw the criminal trial of the Trump Organization and of the entity’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. In a speech to supporters later that night at Mar-a-Lago, Trump criticized not only Merchan, who made trivial donations to Democrats in 2020, but the jurist’s wife and his daughter, whose consulting firm worked with the campaigns of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that year.
When asked by ABC This Week host Jonathan Karl if he approved of such comments, Trusty at first claimed to be focused on legal matters.
“I’ll just say this: I mean, there’s kind of a political lane and a legal lane. I’m in the legal lane. I’m not going to worry too much or be able to try to control the politics of the moment,” he said before taking issue with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the merits of the indictment.
Rolling Stone reported Thursday that although Trump’s allies plan to “fight dirty” in response to his indictment, some of his attorneys are cautioning against comments and social media posts that could be considered threatening, like Trump posting on Truth Social an article showing him with a baseball bat beside Bragg.
When Karl followed up by asking if Trusty, unlike Trump, believed Merchan to be an impartial judge, he replied that he couldn’t say one way or the other.
“I don’t have any experience with this judge, and again, my practice as somebody who’s been in the criminal justice lane for about 35, 36 years is to not jump on to any bandwagon when it comes to criticizing,” Trusty said. He then insisted that Trump singling out Merchan’s wife and daughter, both of whom have nothing to do with his criminal case, wasn’t “personal.”
“I think the criticisms of the family were not something personal. It was pointing out that they have a bias—that they have a political interest that is contrary to President Trump’s,” Trusty claimed.