Trump Lawyer Rebuked at ABA for Saying DOJ in a ‘Better Place’

A typically collegial white collar legal conference turned testy when one of the president’s defense attorneys faced incredulous and at one point rancorous pushback for praising Trump’s Justice Department.

John Lauro, who represented President Donald Trump in special counsel Jack Smith’s 2020 election interference case, offered a starkly opposing view to his co-panelists Friday at an American Bar Association-hosted discussion in San Diego on threats to the rule of law.

Veteran department officials and a former judge described a constitutional crisis playing out under Attorney General Pam Bondi. But Lauro said DOJ is “in a better place” than a year earlier “because I have the unique experience of representing a political figure who was probably more abused by the criminal justice system in America than any other political figure ever.”

“Everything that has gone on in the current administration must be looked at from the eyes of a man who was victimized by the criminal justice system,” added Lauro, who is closely connected with Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Retired US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches at Harvard Law School, later retorted: “Whatever the issues were with respect to the Trump prosecution, they do not justify the fracture of American democracy.”

When Lauro was pressed later by an attendee in the crowd—former Arizona federal prosecutor Mark Kokanovich—how he could assert the situation has improved, other attendees applauded.

“It’s very clear,” Lauro replied to Kokanovich. “We’re not prosecuting the leading political opponent to President Trump right now” as took place in the Biden administration.

Another of the many former assistant US attorneys turned white collar defense lawyers gathered in San Diego took a less diplomatic approach during the audience question-and-answer session.

“I wanted to thank Mr. Lauro for admitting the emperor has no clothes—the rule of law is dead because the people in this room and the Department of Justice pissed off President Trump” and “we have a president who can dictate what is done and what is not done,” said Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey. “Thank you for admitting that the dictator in place in the White House has killed the rule of law. I really appreciate that.”

Some attendees in the conference ballroom clapped.

“I know this has been a therapy session for you, and I hope that has helped,” responded Lauro, who is a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York. “I know this is an emotional time for you.”

Someone in the audience then shouted, “You’re a clown.”

Lauro remained calm throughout the two-hour session and the seven other lawyers seated next to him on the stage engaged in civil—yet vehement—disagreements about a department some said is being unconstitutionally controlled by Trump.

The discussion reflected a palpable vibe shift towards despair over DOJ norm-breaking and judicial attacks at an event where practitioners have in prior years tended to offer politically-neutral analysis of government trends.

Sandy Weinberg, the Zuckerman Spaeder attorney moderating the panel has known Lauro—his former law partner—more than 40 years. But on several occasions Weinberg interrupted Lauro’s defense of Trump administration actions with sharp questions.

“I can’t believe that you think that that’s normal or good that one person can dictate who the Department of Justice investigates and indicts,” Weinberg said.

“That’s what the Supreme Court said,” Lauro countered, referring to the justices’ 2024 decision granting Trump and any president immunity.

Other panelists, including former Obama White House Counsel Neil Eggleston and Aaron Zebley, a top deputy to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his probe of Trump, took turns respectfully arguing that Lauro’s reasoning was invalid.

“John, what your analysis leaves out is a few other constitutional requirements that this president is ignoring,” said Paul Fishman, the former Obama-appointed New Jersey US attorney who now represents Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) in DOJ criminal cases that have been roundly criticized as politically motivated. “For example, it is unconstitutional to decide who you’re going to prosecute based on what they say.”

Lauro took several opportunities at an event boycotted by the Trump administration to say it was “shocking” that the defense bar, including the ABA, stayed silent during his criminal defense of the president.

“Prosecuting criminally the person who is running against the president of the United States and denying him a fair trial” has never happened before, Lauro said, “The fact that no group of lawyers opposed that is obscene to me.”

Kokanovich, the Arizona lawyer in the crowd, said that while Lauro was persuasive when speaking on the same panel a year earlier about the overreaching prosecution of Trump, he couldn’t accept it as a justification for what’s subsequently happened at DOJ.

A year ago, “we didn’t have a president saying, ‘I want Democrats prosecuted,’ and a president saying, ‘prosecute Senator Kelly,’ and then get a no bill,” Kokanovich said. “That’s crazy, right?”