A law firm that has long defended Donald Trump’s campaign and businesses from employment lawsuits has abruptly asked to withdraw from a yearslong case over what it calls an “irreparable breakdown in the attorney-client relationship.” The firm — LaRocca, Hornik, Greenberg, Rosen, Kittridge...
www.yahoo.com
Late Friday, a law firm that has long defended
Donald Trump’s campaign and businesses asked a federal magistrate judge to allow it to withdraw from a suit filed by a former campaign surrogate, A.J. Delgado, who says she was sidelined by the campaign in 2016 after revealing she was pregnant. The timing of the motion was notable, just two days after the same federal court had ordered the campaign to turn over in discovery all complaints of sexual harassment and gender or pregnancy discrimination from the 2016 and 2020 campaigns — materials that the defendants have long resisted handing over.
The apparent rupture with a long-trusted firm comes at a busy time, legally speaking, for the former president.
But such a break would hardly be new. In January, one of Trump’s defense lawyers, Joe Tacopina, said he would no longer represent him. Last year, at least four of his other lawyers, representing him in a variety of civil and criminal cases, stepped aside.
The firm has represented Trump’s business interests for at least a decade, defending Trump Model Management in a wage case filed in 2014, for example. It also represented the campaign in both of Trump’s previous runs for the White House and was paid $1.8 million between September 2016 and December 2020, Federal Election Commission records show. Since then, the former president’s super political action committee, Make America Great Again Inc., has paid LaRocca Hornik an additional $990,000, including a payment of $15,103.90 as recently as March 25.
In addition to the case filed by Delgado, the firm is still representing the campaign in a sexual discrimination and abuse lawsuit filed by Jessica Denson, a former Hispanic outreach coordinator for the 2016 campaign.
Delgado brought her suit against the campaign, as well as against former advisers Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer, in 2019, claiming sex and pregnancy discrimination.
While working for the campaign, she became pregnant by her supervisor, Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser and spokesperson. When she revealed her pregnancy shortly after the 2016 election, her complaint said, she was relieved of most of her duties and “immediately and inexplicably stopped receiving emails and other communications.”