Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has responded to assertions by Timothy Parlatore, a lawyer who said he left the team because of disagreements on strategies in the wake of the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Parlatore discussed his departure from Trump’s legal team on CNN’s “Newsroom” on Saturday, saying that the presence of “certain individuals” in the team has “made defending the president much harder than it needed to be.”
“There is one individual who works for him, Boris Epshteyn, who had really done everything he could to try to block us, to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president,” Parlatore, who announced quitting the legal team on Wednesday, told CNN’s Paula Reid.
Parlatore also accused Epshteyn of acting like “a filter” that prevented lawyers from providing Trump with information and getting information from Trump.
“There were certain things like the searches that he had attempted to interfere with,” Parlatore added. He didn’t specify whether he meant the FBI’s initial search of Mar-a-Lago last August or the additional searches conducted by the legal team at the resort after that.
A Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement that Parlatore’s claims are “categorically false.”
“Mr. Parlatore is no longer a member of the legal team,” the Trump spokesperson said. “His statements regarding current members of the legal team are unfounded and categorically false.”
A friend of Eric Trump’s from their days at Georgetown University, Epshteyn first joined the 2016 Trump campaign as a communications aide. He served as a strategic adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign and remained one of Trump’s confidants after the 2020 election.
In November 2020, Epshteyn famously joined then-Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at a press conference at the Republican National Committee’s Washington headquarters, in which they claimed that Democrats had stolen from Trump hundreds of thousands of votes in key battleground states, although he did not speak.
More recently, Epshteyn accompanied Trump for the trip last month to a Manhattan courthouse, where the former president was arraigned on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.
In photos from the courtroom, Epshteyn can be seen sitting with Trump and other lawyers at the defendant’s table, although he was not one of the lawyers on the case.
Trump on Mar-a-Lago Raid
On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, seizing boxes of material, some of which included classified documents. The search followed efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to retrieve material Trump took with him at the end of his first term.As early as November 2022, President Joe Biden’s lawyers found classified documents were discovered at the president’s former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. In December, additional documents were found at his private home in Delaware. Neither discovery was made public until this January when the media broke the story, and the White House confirmed it.
Lawyers for former Vice President Mike Pence have also reported that they had found “a small number” of classified documents at his Indiana home. They said Pence himself elected to do the search after learning of the classified documents that had been discovered at Biden’s Delaware residence.
Speaking at a town hall forum in New Hampshire earlier this month, Trump said he “had every right” to take those documents with him when leaving the White House.
“When we left Washington, we had the boxes lined up on the sidewalk outside for everybody,” Trump told host Kaitlan Collins of CNN. “People are taking pictures of them. Everybody knew we were taking those boxes.”
In an April 2023 letter to the House Intelligence Committee, Trump’s legal team offered an explanation for how classified documents ended up mixed in with unclassified materials, describing such mishandling as what sounds like a chronic problem affecting multiple presidential administrations.
“White House institutional practices for the handling of classified materials—including declassification procedures—are inconsistent with how the intelligence community and military handles classified materials. This is indicative of the staff’s packing processes and not any criminal intent by President Trump,” the letter read.
“The White House staff simply swept all documents from the President’s desk and other areas into boxes, where they have resided ever since.”
The letter also alleged that the NARA “unfortunately has become overtly political and declined to provide archival assistance to President Trump’s transition team.”
“As demonstrated by the discovery of documents with classification markings1 in the homes of President Trump, President Biden, and Vice President Pence, deficient document handling and storage procedures are not limited to any individual, administration, or political party,” the lawyers argued. “A legislative solution by Congress is required to prevent the DOJ from continuing to conduct ham-handed criminal investigations of matters that are inherently not criminal.”
