Former President Donald Trump should testify in any of his pending court battles, including the federal trial on charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice, a member of his legal team said.
Alina Habba, a spokesperson for Mr. Trump’s legal team who represents him in several civil matters, told The Washington Times that she has no problem if the former president wants to take the stand to defend himself in any criminal trial.
“I think he’s a fantastic advocate for himself because nobody can say it better than himself what he did and didn’t do,” she said.
Ms. Habba said she prefers Mr. Trump to testify in the civil cases in which she has represented him.
“I think that he’s very educated, very well-spoken, and he’s done nothing wrong. So when he’s done nothing wrong, you speak to that when you can and when it’s legally sound,” she said.
Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, faces a host of charges at the state and federal levels. More charges are expected.
He has been indicted in two cases. Special counsel Jack Smith filed federal criminal charges accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling classified government documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them after he left office.
In that case, Mr. Trump faces 37 criminal charges, including 31 claiming he withheld national defense information. He is also charged with concealing the possession of classified documents and making false statements.
Mr. Smith is also investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his role in events that led to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump in April. Mr. Trump is charged with illegally orchestrating a hush-money scheme to keep potential sex scandals out of the press before the 2016 election.
A prosecutor in Georgia is in the final stages of her investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the state’s 2020 election results.
Ms. Habba said Mr. Trump might not testify in all cases, even if they go to trial. She said the decision would be made on a case-by-case basis depending on legal strategy.
“That doesn’t mean that’s what’s best in a criminal case with a DOJ lead by Jack Smith. Every case for any lawyer is case by case, so we’d have to look at it. But am I ever concerned for Donald Trump per se? No,” Ms. Habba said. “So when he’s done nothing wrong, you speak to that when you can and when it’s legally sound, but, again, it’s a strategy decision. It’s a legal strategy decision for the attorneys of record to decide at the moment.”
Legal analysts say Mr. Trump might have to take the stand in the classified documents case to explain his claim that he declassified the documents he transferred from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Mr. Trump insisted he had the authority as president to declassify documents just by saying so or even thinking about it.
“If you are going to argue that Trump thought in his head these documents were declassified, you can’t get that in evidence without testimony from the former president,” said Jared Carter, who teaches constitutional law at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Once Mr. Trump is on the stand, he will be subject to cross-examination by Mr. Smith’s team. That could spell trouble for the former president, Mr. Carter said.
“It will be a legal train wreck. You are going to have prosecutors asking questions, and you are going to have to respond under oath, and Trump isn’t going to be able to keep his mouth shut,” he said. “Prosecutors would relish the opportunity to cross-examine Trump. That’s why defendants don’t testify on their behalf.”
Former Attorney General William Barr, once a staunch ally of Mr. Trump, also has questioned the wisdom of putting him on the stand in the New York case.
“Generally, I think it’s a bad idea to go on the stand, and I think it’s a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control. It would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion,” Mr. Barr said on Fox News.
The former president passed up the opportunity to take the stand last month in a civil case filed by E. Jean Carroll, an author and former magazine advice columnist. Ms. Carroll accused Mr. Trump of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and then defaming her while denying the allegations.
A jury last month concluded that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll but did not rape her. The jury ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll a total of $5 million in damages.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who was overseeing the civil case, gave Mr. Trump’s legal team an opportunity to decide whether the former president would testify. They opted not to put him on the stand.
Ms. Carroll’s attorney, Mike Ferrara, told jurors during closing arguments that Mr. Trump’s team never called him to the stand because “it would hurt their case if they did.”
“You should draw the conclusion that’s because he did it,” Mr. Ferrara said.
Joe Tacopina, representing Mr. Trump, said the defense team would have called him to the stand if they thought his testimony was paramount to the case.
“If Donald Trump had come, what could I have asked him? About some unknown date?” said Mr. Tacopina, referring to the vagueness of Ms. Carroll’s allegations, including her inability to remember the day or year of the alleged assault.
He noted that Ms. Carroll’s attorneys could have called Mr. Trump but didn’t.
Mr. Tacopina did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Times.
Although Mr. Trump did not testify, a video of his deposition was played to the jury. It created several headaches for his team. In the video, Mr. Trump defended his comments in an “Access Hollywood” tape in which he talked about getting away with grabbing women by the genitals because he is a “star.”
Mr. Trump said in the deposition that he was only pointing out that such actions were historically “true with stars.”
“If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately,” he said.
At one point in the deposition, Mr. Trump mistook a photo of Ms. Carroll for ex-wife Marla Maples. The mix-up undercut Mr. Trump’s early claims that Ms. Carroll wasn’t his type and that he wouldn’t have been attracted to her.
While being questioned in the deposition about the decades-old photo of Ms. Carroll standing next to Mr. Trump at a party, the former president said several times that she was his second wife, Ms. Maples.
“That’s Marla,” he said of the photo, which also featured his first wife, Ivana Trump. “That’s my wife.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the first name of former President Donald Trump’s first wife.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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