Four Columbia SC lawyers, Raleigh lawyer leave Trump’s impeachment team

Four Columbia lawyers — including lead lawyer Butch Bowers — are leaving former President Donald Trump’s legal impeachment team, according to numerous news reports and a Trump spokesman.

Columbia criminal defense attorneys Deborah Barbier, Greg Harris and Johnny Gasser are joining Bowers in leaving the team of what had been four prominent Columbia lawyers who were to make up the core of Trump’s defense team for the trial in the U.S. Senate, set to begin on the week of Feb. 8.

A fifth lawyer, Josh Howard, of Raleigh, is also no longer on the defense team, according to national news reports.

All five have résumés with quality legal experience. Barbier, Harris and Gasser are former federal prosecutors and successful criminal defense lawyers who have defended high profile political and professional clients around the state.

Bowers, a former chair of the S.C. Election Commission, is a GOP insiders’ lawyer who has represented the state’s last three Republican governors — Mark Sanford, Nikki Haley and current Gov. Henry McMaster — on various issues and the states of both Carolinas on election issues.

Howard, a defense attorney with the Raleigh firm of Gammon, Howard and Zeszotarski, was part of the team that investigated President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, The News & Observer reported. More recently, he served as chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections under former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory from 2013 to 2016. He represented former N.C. state Rep. David Lewis, who was charged last year with federal crimes involving campaign money.

Who will defend Trump in impeachment trial?

The news of Trump’s legal team’s departures broke Saturday night and left many wondering who Trump will come up with to defend him in his historic second impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. With the trial set to begin in a little more than a week, any lawyers — who normally need months if not more than a year to prepare for a major court event — will be operating under a major time handicap.

None of the five lawyers made any statement about why they are parting ways. A Trump spokesman characterized the break-up as a “mutual decision.”

Bowers was the first lawyer chosen by Trump, who took U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s recommendation that he should hire Bowers and take his recommendations for other lawyers. Last year, Bowers was one of a team of Republican lawyers who won a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court that limited efforts to make it easier for people to vote during the pandemic.

On Thursday, Graham, one of Trump’s most loyal allies, had sent this statement to The State newspaper: “I think President Trump is going have a good legal team. Butch Bowers will be sort of the anchor tenant. I’ve known Butch for a long time. Solid guy.”

The New York Times reported late Saturday night that a knowledgeable source said that Bowers and Trump had “no chemistry” and it was a “mutual” decision for Bowers and Barbier to part ways.

Trump likes to work with people with whom he has chemistry, and “Mr. Trump prefers lawyers who are eager to appear on television to say that he never did anything wrong; Mr. Bowers has been noticeably absent in the news media since his hiring was announced,” The Times reported. Bowers has a reputation of not talking to the media.

The Times reported that Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, said that the former president and his aides had “not made a final decision on our (new) legal team.”

Under a bill of impeachment passed by the U.S. House on Jan. 13, Trump is being tried for “high crimes and misdemeanors” tied to his alleged role in inciting a riot on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol that caused members of Congress to flee the House and Senate chambers. If found guilty by two-thirds of the senators, the Senate could vote to prohibit him from ever running for office again.

In South Carolina’s legal community, phones lit up Saturday night as lawyers passed along the news that first Barbier and Bowers, then Gasser and Harris, were out. Speculation was rampant about why.

State Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, who knows all four Columbia lawyers, told The State newspaper on Sunday that there are several general reasons why clients and lawyers part ways.

“It could be that their client is attempting to dictate a strategy that is morally and ethically repugnant, or that they won’t be paid. Typically, some cases you don’t make a lot of money, but you don’t want to lose money either,” Harpootlian said.

“There’s is an assumption that Trump wanted to relitigate the election again,” Harpootlian said, referring to the approximately 60 lawsuits alleging massive election fraud filed in state and federal courts in the half-dozen battleground states that President Joe Biden beat Trump. Trump, who still contends without evidence that the election was rigged and victory stole from him, lost virtually all the election fraud lawsuits.

Moreover, the Department of Justice and FBI under former Attorney General William Barr investigated election fraud allegations and found nothing serious enough to overturn Biden’s victory in any state.

“Putting up a defense that the election was stolen would not likely be something that Butch Bowers and the others would want any part of. You can’t advocate a lie,” Harpootlian said. “It would not only be destined to failure, but it would create a carnival circus atmosphere and create chaos — which is not something that anybody with any integrity would want to be part of.”

On ABC This Week, a Sunday morning news talk show, ABC White House chief correspondent Cecilia Vega said that, “Trump remains fixated on this false notion that he won the election. He wanted the lawyers to really focus in his impeachment trial on widespread voter fraud.”

Trump’s approach conflicts sharply with the defense strategy advocated by Republican senators, who “believe that impeaching a former president, post-presidency, is unconstitutional,” Vega said. “The president (Trump) is still down there in Florida fixated on this notion that he did not actually lose this election that he actually lost.”

Other national news organization, such as The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and CNN, reported over the weekend that Trump’s lawyers left because of a fundamental disagreement over Trump’s insistence that allegations of election fraud be central to his defense.

“A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard,” CNN reported late Saturday night.

CNN’s initially reported Bowers’ and Barbier’s departures around 8 pm Saturday. Shortly thereafter, the news was confirmed by a tweet from New York Times Washington reporter Maggie Haberman, regarded by many as having some of the best sources into Trump’s former White House administration.

Elie Honig, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told CNN on Saturday night he believed — speaking from his legal experience — that there was “dissension” between the lawyers and Trump on how to proceed.

“Keeping in mind that Mr. Bowers is ... an ethics specialist, what sometimes happens is that the client wants you to make a certain argument, and as an attorney, you feel you cannot make that argument in good faith or ethically. That sometimes leads to this kind of rift that we are seeing here,” Honig said.

“The reason you would step away from a high profile case like this that you are likely to win is because you have some kind of ethical disagreement, or principled disagreement, with the direction that the client here, Donald Trump, wants you to go,” Honig said.

Lawyers who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial have said they are not participating in this trial.

The lawyers’ reputations

In the Columbia legal community, Bowers, Barbier, Gasser and Harris have a reputation as aggressive, competent lawyers. All four have worked together on cases over the years.

In the days since the four were reported to be part of Trump’s legal team, negative articles about two of the four — Bowers and Harris — have surfaced.

According to the Washington Post, “Public records show that Bowers has had federal liens placed on his property in Columbia that totaled more than $400,000, and The Post did not find records showing the liens had been released. Such liens are usually placed to recover tax debts. Bowers said in the interview that the liens have all been satisfied,” The Washington Post reported.

The HuffPost reported that in 1989, the S.C. Supreme Court had said in an opinion that Harris, while an assistant 5th District solicitor, had used racial stereotypes to keep Black citizens from serving on the trial jury hearing a DUI case.

Harris’s history, now made public, even though for an incident 32 years old, would be something likely to be mentioned on national television if he had represented a former president who regularly appealed to racists and inspired a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob that included members of groups espousing white supremacy and conspiracy theories.

That 30-plus-year-old incident appears to be an isolated occurrence in Harris’s career. He has served as chairman of the State Ethics Commission and several years ago successfully represented Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, an African American, in a case before the Ethics Commission.

“They (the four Columbia lawyers) were starting to learn that the national press was going to be tougher on them than the South Carolina press,” a prominent South Carolina attorney with extensive experience in criminal law said Saturday night.

This story was originally published January 30, 2021 at 10:42 PM.