I once had the honor to work as a principal at one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. Years before that, I worked on three presidential campaigns.
As the 2024 presidential campaign played out between first former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden and then Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, I thought often about those two experiences, because of the unethical and un-American “lawfare” strategies rolled out continuously against Trump.
Not only were these seemingly coordinated strategies unprecedented in presidential politics, but they were truly chilling. Almost everyone in the Democratic Party and on the left — be they politicians, the media, academia and certain judicial officials — seemed to be in on this grift to usurp the will of the American people via laughable legal challenges, charges and strategies that would have been universally condemned were they leveled at anyone other than Trump.
As these multiple “lawfare” tactics played, my overriding thought was that Trump better have a first-rate legal team behind him. As it turns out, they were better than first rate. In many critically important ways, they saved the campaign — and the candidate.
And they had to be first rate because they were facing a stacked deck and up against the full force of the Department of Justice. For it was there that Special Counsel Jack Smith filed broad indictments against candidate Trump — the overwhelming favorite for the Republican nomination — in both Washington and Florida that were overly reliant on novel criminal theories and selectively applied against Trump.
Knowing that, Trump leaned heavily on senior legal adviser Boris Epshteyn, one of his most loyal and long-serving confidantes, to lead the recruiting and coordination of a top-tier legal team to fight back against the mounting Democrat-led lawfare campaign. As a savvy behind-the-scenes operator, Epshteyn quickly assembled an exceptional and highly motivated team consisting of Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, John Sauer, Will Scharf, John Lauro and Steve Sadow.
Once in place, the team found itself running a parallel public relations campaign in conjunction with the ever-ramping presidential primary while coordinating 24/7 with campaign leaders Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita as well as as well as campaign communicators Steven Cheung, Jason Miller, Aaron Harison and legal spokesperson Alina Habba. On top of that, Epshteyn had to figure out in a hurry how to play four-dimensional chess.
First, he and the team had to prepare their candidate for a contested GOP primary; next, the general election against Biden; then against Harris; against the Biden-Harris Department of Justice; a special counsel in DC; a district attorney and judge in Manhattan; a district attorney in Georgia; the state Supreme Court in Colorado; and the secretary of State in Maine.
All of the individuals prosecuting these cases against Trump had seemingly done so to unconstitutionally weaponize the law against him to both derail his campaign and destroy his personal and financial life. To prevent that, his legal team rushed into battle on multiple fronts.
Blanche, whom Trump has since nominated to serve as deputy attorney general, took the lead on the Florida and Manhattan cases and also served as co-counsel in the D.C.-based Jan. 6 case with attorney John Lauro. Sauer and Scharf were retained to lead Trump’s appellate team and were the masterminds behind the successful immunity appeal to the Supreme Court.
High-profile attorney Steve Sadow would lead in the Fulton County, Georgia case against District Attorney Fani Willis (D), whose case quickly found itself stuck in the mud after her unethical romantic relationship with a deputy was revealed in pre-trial court motions.
Clearly, failure by the legal team was not an option. It was all or nothing. Win the race or possibly be sent to jail by the so-called protectors of “our democracy,” as the Democrats repeatedly labeled themselves.
In the iconic 1939 film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” the Jefferson Smith character (Jimmy Stewart) is under constant assault by corrupt special interests, politicians and members of the media all looking to destroy him and his populist message for their own biased and greedy reasons (sound familiar?). As Smith prepares to fight to clear his name, a reporter played by Jean Arthur tells him, “It’s a 40-foot dive into a tub of water, but I think you can do it.”
The Trump legal team was forced to make multiple 1,000-foot dives into thimbles of water as they fought back against one invented legal scheme after the other. Time and again, the team prevailed. Be it twice with the Supreme Court; state and city jurisdictions; or, of late, against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos.
While the lawfare campaign has largely been defeated, the two state cases in Manhattan and Georgia retain faint heartbeats in the face of strong reasons for dismissal. In Manhattan, Judge Juan Merchan has a dismissal motion awaiting a decision on his desk. Will he do the right thing and clear the slate, finally ending this charade and travesty of justice? In Georgia, the Court of Appeals just disqualified Willis and her team from prosecuting Trump. An indictment that should never have been brought is now all but over.
For the good of the country, these cases need to end. As we await those final outcomes, it must be noted that Trump’s unheralded legal team continually executed the proper moves at the right times on that four-dimensional chess board. And because they did, Trump himself was able to declare, “checkmate.”
It is a legal campaign for the history books.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.
