Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Is Trump’s Jewish Lawyer Skirting Ethics Rules With Unusual White House Role?

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, is playing a strange dual role in a turbulent White House, the New York Times reported yesterday.

A prominent civil litigator, Kasowitz is representing the president in connection with the Russian investigations. But he’s also considering setting up a White House office, and has given advice about the investigation to White House staff.

According to the Times, Kasowitz advised the staffers not to hire their own lawyers.

Writing at the law blog Lawfare, Paul Rosenzweig suggested that that advice could have broken rules of professional conduct for attorneys.

“Perhaps Mr. Kasowitz needs ethics counsel of his own at this juncture,” Rosenzweig wrote.

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.