Former Trump attorney Timothy Parlatore said on Saturday that he left the former president’s legal team due to internal division.
“It had nothing to do with the case itself or the client,” Parlatore said in an interview with CNN. “The real reason is because there are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be.”
Parlatore, who was one of several attorneys representing former President Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, withdrew earlier this week. He pointed to longtime Trump aide and in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn as the primary source of the problems.
“In particular, there is one individual who works for him, Boris Epshteyn, who had really done everything he could to try to block us, to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president,” Parlatore said.
“He served as kind of a filter to prevent us from getting information to the client and getting information from the client. In my opinion, he was not very honest with us or with the client on certain things,” he added.
The former Trump attorney accused Epshyten of attempting to interfere with searches of the former president’s properties for additional classified materials, following the FBI’s initial search of Mar-a-Lago last August.
“More recently, as we’re coming down to the end of this investigation where [Special Counsel] Jack Smith and ultimately [Attorney General] Merrick Garland is going to make a decision as to what to do, as we put together our defense strategy to help educate Merrick Garland as to how best to handle this matter, he was preventing us from engaging in that strategy,” Parlatore added.
In a statement to CNN, a Trump spokesperson dismissed Parlatore’s claims as “unfounded and categorically false.”