A disciplinary committee on Tuesday said it would not act on a complaint by adult entertainment actress Stormy Daniels alleging that one of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers has a conflict of interest due to the attorney’s alleged prior representation of Ms. Daniels.
It came as the latest development in President Trump’s criminal case in New York, in which state prosecutors from Manhattan District Alvin Bragg’s office charged that the former President falsified business records related to hush money paid to multiple people, including Daniels, who allege that Trump had affairs with them. Trump has denied all wrongdoing related to the case and said that the case against him is politically motivated.
The grievance committee, which investigates complaints involving attorneys’ violations of professional conduct rules, notified Tacopina on Tuesday that it would not entertain Ms. Daniels’s request.
The judicial committee’s dismissal on Wednesday marked the end of Ms. Daniels’s attempt to limit or remove Mr. Tacopina from President Trump’s criminal case in New York. A separate attempt was made by prosecutors from Mr. Bragg’s office during Trump’s arraignment hearing in April, when they suggested to the court that Mr. Tacopina might have represented Ms. Daniels, a key witness in the case, thereby incurring a conflict of interest that would potentially disqualify him from the case.
In response, Mr. Tacopina denied having any direct communications with Ms. Daniels.
“I never met Stormy Daniels. I never spoke to Stormy Daniels, and I never reviewed any documents of Stormy Daniels,” Mr. Tacopina said during the hearing on April 4, 2023.
Mr. Tacopina added in the hearing that a requirement for giving rise to attorney conflict of interest is that the attorney must “be in possession of information that is significantly harmful to” a prospective client, or in this case, President Trump. That requirement fails here, Mr. Tacopina said, because any information Ms. Daniels sent to Mr. Tacopina has already been included in her 2018 memoir, “Full Disclosure,” which included the details of her alleged affairs with President Trump.
Juan Merchan, the New York Supreme Court judge overseeing this case, ruled in September that Mr. Tacopina is not involved in a conflict-of-interest situation by representing President Trump, media outlets reported.
“Now both the court and the disciplinary committee have ruled that there was no conflict or ethical violation at all, as I have said from day one. It seems that Stormy Daniels and her joke of a lawyer’s 15 minutes of fame have come to an appropriate end,” Mr. Tacopina told The Epoch Times in a statement on Wednesday after the committee issued the letter.
Mr. Brewster did not return a request for comment by The Epoch Times by press time.
While the trial date for this case is set for March 24, 2024, prosecutors and President Trump’s lawyers have already exchanged legal volleys in pretrial motions.
The charges, which came six years after public reporting of the alleged affair, have “prejudiced President Trump, interfered with his ongoing presidential campaign, and violated his due process rights,” the lawyers argue in the motion. They also argue that the case should be dismissed because President Trump was selectively targeted for prosecution, the statute of limitations for the charges has expired, and the charges are legally defective because of a lack of evidence of criminal intent.
The prosecutors argue, in response to the defense lawyers’ point about President Trump’s ongoing campaign, that President Trump is attempting to “evade criminal responsibility” because he is a current presidential candidate, and that “the neutral application of the facts and the law demonstrates that there is no basis to dismiss this case.”
Judge Merchan will consider the motion to dismiss and the prosecutors’ response in a hearing on Feb. 15, 2024.
