Donald Trump has hired a new lawyer amid speculation the former president will be indicted as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the 2020 election investigation, according to reports.
John Lauro, founder of the Lauro Law Firm, now known as Lauro & Singer, has joined Trump’s legal team and is focusing on dealing with Smith’s investigation into the attempt to overturn the results of the last presidential election, according to CNN.
Shelby Talcott, a reporter for Semafor, confirmed the news of Lauro’s hiring on Twitter, citing a “family source.” news week reached out to Lauro’s office via email for comment.
Trump’s addition of a new face to his defense team came after the former president said he had received a letter informing him that he was the subject of a federal investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the events that led to the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol, a sign that Trump is on the brink of another impeachment.
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Trump, the frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, has denied any wrongdoing in connection with the Smith investigation, accusing it of “election interference.”
Lauro is said to be joining the team along with Todd Blanche, who is also representing the former president in the classified documents case and in New York, where Trump is accused of falsifying business records. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him in both cases.
Lauro represented Trump’s attorney, Christina Bobb, when prosecutors in Georgia were trying to talk to her about the former president’s alleged attempt to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Speaking to ABC News in March, Lauro claimed that prosecutors from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office wanted to question Bobb even though they “didn’t know anything about any paperwork” she may have had in Georgia.
“They had a year and a half of investigation and they never got close to Christina Bobb,” he said. “It was one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had.”
Bobb, a former One America News Network (OAN) anchor, was one of the Trump attorneys present during the FBI raid for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago last August, a case Smith is now leading.
Lauro handles criminal and commercial litigation, handling cases involving “accounting, securities, conspiracy, health care, and other white-collar and commercial litigation matters,” according to a description page on his firm’s website.
Growing up in New York, Lauro graduated from Georgetown University before attending Georgetown University Law Center.
He returned to New York and began practicing at the international law firm of Morgan, Lewis and Bockius before joining the criminal division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
In 1994 he created his own firm, which would later become Lauro & Singer. The firm has offices in New York and Florida.