Report: Anti-Trump Lawyers, Media Pundits Hold Secret Weekly Strategy Calls on Trump Legal Cases

A group of anti-Trump lawyers and media analysts are secretly convening weekly via Zoom to discuss and strategize over former President Donald Trump’s legal cases, according to a report.

Ankush Khardori, a former federal prosecutor and senior writer for Politico magazine, revealed Tuesday every Friday since 2022, former Obama official, Trump impeachment legal team member and CNN legal analyst Norman Eisen has hosted a Zoom call for Trump hating lawyers and pundits to “hash out” developments in the cases and “stress-test” legal arguments against Trump.

The meetings are off-the-record and, according to Khardori, are “a chance for the group’s members” — many who are affiliated with MSNBC or CNN — to “grapple with” novel legal issues before discussing them on air.

Members include lead Russia collusion hoax prosecutor and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman, Trump-hating Bill Kristol, Harvard scholar Laurence Tribe, former Nixon lawyer and CNN contributor John Dean, the Lincoln Project’s George Conway, and disgraced legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who was previously fired from CNN for exposing himself during a Zoom call.

Other members include CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, NBC/MSNBC legal analysts and podcasters Barb McQuade and Joyce White Vance, MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin, former senior Justice Department official and MSNBC podcaster Mary McCord, CNN commentator Karen Agnifilo, and CNN commentator Elliot Williams.

Other “regulars” include the most strident legal voices on lefty social media, such as New York University professor Ryan Goodman, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, former FBI Special Agent and ABC News contributor Asha Rangappa.

There are usually about a dozen people on the call, and “most are united by their dislike of Trump,” according to the report.

There are sometimes special guests, such as House January 6 committee staffers, E. Jean Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan, the former judge who led a public campaign to disqualify Trump from ballots J. Michael Luttig.

Khardori writes somewhat cynically — almost mockingly — of the group, calling it “the perfect emblem of today’s Trump-media-legal-industrial complex.”

He notes how the group members have leveraged Trump’s legal issues to advance their own careers:

Trump’s unprecedented legal situation has generated intense public interest and a robust media ecosystem of its own. Suddenly, lawyers and legal pundits who might once have been relegated to unglamorous client or academic work are in very high demand in the media — even more so today than during Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. They are hosting podcasts, writing books and popular Substacks and crafting well-followed social media feeds that often appear to serve, as a practical matter, as self-promotional tools for their other media products and as a mechanism to attract the attention of television bookers with the latest hot take about Trump’s court cases. For them, this is a unique opportunity to weigh in with the public at a critical juncture in American politics and to obtain a level of public recognition and stature that few lawyers can ever attain. The people on this call — and on some level the call itself — are essential cogs in that system, helping to generate and shape content for Trump-hungry consumers.

Khardori wrote that some members of the group were anxious about his story, and were concerned it would give credence to Trump’s accusations of a legal conspiracy against him.

“It runs the risk of creating the impression that there is an agreement or cooperation or conspiracy across mainstream media entities,” one person told him. “And that could feed into some false and damaging perceptions, particularly on the right.”
And members denied they were devising talking points or strategy to take down Trump as a part of a bid to send him to prison or derail his presidential campaign.

“It feels almost like a seminar in law school,” a participant in the group claimed, adding, that most calls comprise “deliberation, debate and discussion,” albeit “with a distinct anti-Trump tilt to it.”

The report revealed, however, that some members are skeptical about the merits of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump and about whether he should have been brought in the first place. That has been “something of a running theme across some of the calls,” the report said.

Trump allies and conservative commentators did not buy group member denials of coordination.

Former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer posted on X:

[I]f you thought there was an organized effort against Trump….you were right and the cover just got blown off Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti–Trump Legal Pundits

Washington Examiner columnist Byron York posted: “Anyone surprised that there is a group like this?”

Commentator Joe Concha posted: “The legal ‘analysis’ you therefore see on CNN/MSNBC by these winners is all contrived.”

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