Attorney Joseph Tacopina Said Trump Should Be Indicted For Campaign Finance Fraud. Right Up Until He Signed That Retainer Agreement.

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

How is Joseph Tacopina for real?

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Donald Trump’s newest lawyer, who represents him in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, as well as the supposedly imminent indictment for the Stormy Daniels hush money payment, can’t stop, won’t stop flapping his yap on TV about Trump’s case.

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“I believe this will catapult him into the White House,” he vamped to NBC’s Ari Melber last Tuesday.

Tacopina, a defense lawyer with a heretofore good reputation, has spent the past two weeks making increasingly manic appearances to insist that his client wasn’t lying when he falsely claimed not to know about the 2016 hush money payout to keep Daniels quiet about a sexual encounter with the presidential candidate.

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“Here’s why it’s not a lie,” he told Melber. “Because it was a confidential settlement. So if he acknowledged that, he would be violating the confidential settlement. So, is it the truth? Of course it’s not the truth. Was he supposed to tell the truth? He would be in violation of the agreement if he told the truth. So by him doing that, he was abiding by, not only his rights, but Stormy Daniels’s rights.”

On Friday, it emerged that Tacopina had met with Daniels in 2018 about that very agreement, and he admitted to CNN’s Don Lemon that he had an attorney-client relationship with her. This put rather a different spin on his claim Monday to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Daniels was an extortionist.

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And now yet another tape has surfaced with the lawyer trashing the very claims he’s now making on Trump’s behalf.

2018 pic.twitter.com/qdJJmRjJpU

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“If there’s an issue with that payment to Stormy Daniels being that it was made on behalf of the candidate, okay, and it was not declared, that’s fair game,” he told Don Lemon back in 2018.

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Last week, Tacopina was calling Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer who pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation for his role in the scheme, a liar. But five years ago, he had a different take:

Quite frankly, Michael Cohen, again, has made statements that would give rise to suspicion for any prosecutor to say ‘That doesn’t make sense, that a lawyer took out a home equity loan with his own money, paid somebody that he didn’t even know, on behalf of a client who, by the way, had the wherewithal and the money to afford $130,000. And by the way, didn’t tell the client about the settlement agreement.’ It’s an illegal agreement, it’s fraud, if that’s in fact the case.

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It’s kind of a bad fact to have said on air that your client’s legal position “doesn’t pass the straight face test, and quite frankly, if that is what happened, we have potential campaign finance issues.” As is Tacopina’s promise of “all out war” if Trump is indicted.

He made the prediction in an interview with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, whom he represented before the January 6 Committee. You’d think that these two would have better judgment than to threaten violence if the former president doesn’t get what he wants.

But then again … maybe not.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Courts, Donald Trump, Joe Tacopina, Legal Ethics