Trump went to Miami court with a thin legal team. Here’s who was there

When former President Donald Trump entered a not guilty plea in a Miami courthouse on Tuesday, he was accompanied by two lawyers after scrambling to find local legal experts to represent him.

Trump faces 37 felony counts of mishandling and illegally retaining classified material, including some of the most sensitive secrets in the U.S. government such as details on the U.S. nuclear arsenal, attack plans against American adversaries and vulnerabilities to the national security of the United States.

Trump is seeking to build out his defense team ahead of a high-stakes trial after two lawyers working on his case resigned last week. But for his initial court appearance, two attorneys who have been by the former president’s side during his other legal challenges joined to represent him.

Chris Kise

The federal court required Trump’s legal team to include at least one local attorney who is a member in good standing with the Florida bar. Chris Kise, a Florida-based attorney to the former president since 2022, filled that role.

Kise has been working on Trump’s legal challenges in New York and was not originally scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday.

Kise served as the Solicitor General of Florida from 2003 to 2006 and has been an advisor to Republican politicians, including Gov. Ron DeSantis.

He joined Trump’s legal team in the classified documents case last fall, but reduced his role over disagreements about legal strategy, according to CNN.

Todd Blanche

Todd Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who is also working on Trump’s defense against felony charges in New York state, attended the hearing and entered a not guilty plea on Trump’s behalf.

READ MORE: Trump pleads not guilty in classified documents case in Miami federal court

Blanche joined Trump’s legal team in April to lead the former president’s defense against a 34-count felony indictment in New York over falsifying business records, in an alleged scheme to cover up an extramarital affair ahead of the 2016 election.

Blanche previously served in the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, before working at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, a white collar New York law firm.

Expanding defense team

Preparing for the trial ahead, Trump has begun a wider search for local attorneys with intimate knowledge of the court and jury pool in the southern district of Florida, as well as a national security lawyer with experience defending clients in cases involving classified information. For similar reasons, the U.S. special counsel prosecuting the case, Jack Smith, has recently added attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami to his team.

Among the Florida attorneys that Trump’s team contacted Monday was Benedict Kuehne, according to The Washington Post. Kuehne frequently represents local politicians — most recently defending Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo in a civil trial.

The former president’s efforts to build out his legal team come after two attorneys who had been working on the documents case, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned last week, within hours of the special counsel announcing the indictment.

Trump thanked Trusty and Rowley upon their departure and said in a statement, “we will be announcing additional lawyers in the coming days.”

This story was originally published June 13, 2023 at 11:48 AM with the headline "Trump went to Miami court with a thin legal team. Here’s who was there."

Michael Wilner

McClatchy DC

202-383-6083

Michael Wilner is an award-winning journalist and was McClatchy’s chief Washington correspondent. Wilner joined the company in 2019 as a White House correspondent, and led coverage for its 30 newspapers of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the Biden administration. Wilner was previously Washington bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post. He holds degrees from Claremont McKenna College and Columbia University and is a native of New York City.

Aaron Leibowitz

Miami Herald

305-423-9857

Aaron Leibowitz covers the city of Miami Beach for the Miami Herald, where he has worked as a local government reporter since 2019. He was part of a team that won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside. He is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.