Meet the (very) liberal lawyer who is defending Trump
He champions Democrat causes and his famous clients are rap stars. So why is Drew Findling representing the former president in Georgia?
In his work as one of America’s pre-eminent criminal defence attorneys, Drew Findling is no stranger to celebrities and politics. Online, where he has nearly a quarter of a million Instagram followers, he is known as the “BillionDollarLawyer”, a nickname that was given to him by one of his many rap star clients.
In political circles his reputation is that of a champion of Democrat causes. “My liberal sentiment is well documented,” he tells me via Zoom from the offices of his law firm in Atlanta, which is true. He has campaigned against the incarceration of immigrants on the Mexican border and the racial injustices he sees embedded in the US justice system. In his home state of Georgia he has pledged to defend free of charge any woman who has been prosecuted under newly restrictive abortion laws made possible by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority. All of which might seem to jar with the latest chapter of his career, which involves him representing Donald Trump.
Findling, 63, has been hired by the former president for a case in Georgia that is expected to gather pace as soon as tomorrow (Tuesday), and which may plunge Trump into yet more legal jeopardy - if, as has been widely speculated, it results in him facing his fourth separate set of criminal charges.
The former reality TV star, who is the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for the White House in 2024, has already been accused by the Department of Justice of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election - a charge that he pleaded not guilty to earlier this month. He also faces federal charges that he mishandled classified documents and a third indictment relates to alleged hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels.
Georgia, though, could be an especially tricky jurisdiction for him. If he did win the presidency again and was later found guilty there, Trump couldn’t pardon himself - which would be unprecedented but might potentially be possible with federal charges. A trial in Georgia would also be more likely to be televised, experts say, raising the prospect of millions of voters tuning in to see him testify.
In a nutshell, the case involves allegations that Trump and his allies sought to steal the state - which Joe Biden narrowly won by a margin of 0.23 per cent or 11,779 votes - in the 2020 presidential election. A focal point is a phone call made by Trump to a senior Georgia official after polling had been completed but before Biden had taken office.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump told the official during the hour-long conversation. “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
A district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia - the capital of which is Atlanta, where Findling lives - has been investigating the matter for more than two years. A grand jury has heard evidence and a decision is anticipated soon on which targets of the investigation, if any, will face criminal charges. The media are “expecting something to happen any hour,” says Findling, who appears on the video call wearing a sharp business suit but not the sunglasses he sports in virtually every picture posted to his Instagram account. In part that’s because security measures are being ramped up around the building where Trump would appear if he were indicted.
Prosecutors have reportedly been issued with bulletproof vests after threats were made and Findling, who exudes a sense of easy old-school geniality, says he regrets the shadow of violence. “I do not want anybody in my community to be subjected to threats, to racial epithets,” he says.
It isn’t clear what caused Trump to hire him, but Findling is famous for his strong links to the hip-hop community. The New York Times described him in 2018 as an “indispensable, behind-the-scenes fixture in the world of Atlanta rap - which, with the rise of the trap sound and dominance of streaming, is basically the heart of the musical universe.”
His clients have included Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame - award-winning superstars whose tracks have been streamed billions of times. “He’s the biggest lawyer in the game, man,” Offset, a member of the rap group Migos and Cardi B’s husband, told Vanity Fair last year.
Findling says that actually he’s more of a Seventies soul fan. “Earth, Wind & Fire, the Commodores - you know, I mean, that’s kind of my speed, man.” Nevertheless, he has a reputation for being something of a mentor, a father figure even, to his rapper clients.
He describes how a little while ago he urged a “super internationally famous guy” not to blow dollars 300,000 on a car. “You yelled at me like I was your kid and scared me and I left the dealership,” the chastened young artist later told him.
The “BillionDollar Lawyer” name was given to him by Young Dolph, another rapper client, who died in 2021 after being shot 22 times, but Findling has argued that “this perception that hip-hop, that rap music, is all tied up in violence and drugs - that’s crap’‘.
“For the most part they’re just really nice young people,” he says. “Some of these young folks are putting 18 hours a day in the studio, they want success so badly. A lot of them come from incredibly difficult backgrounds. And I have such admiration for them . . . I don’t love all of them, but many I do love . . . I tell them the importance of saving money, investing properly, finding third parties, not family members, to assist them . . . And I’ve told all of them: don’t invest in restaurants.”
He won’t discuss the Trump case in detail, but does say that the former president came to him, not the other way around. He also says that the fees weren’t a factor. “We were an incredibly successful practice before this case, and will be incredibly successful after this case,” he says.
It’s easy to see how jurors might warm to the avuncular Findling. But does he risk alienating his celebrity clients, who he concedes don’t share Trump’s politics? A representative for Cardi B told The New Yorker that the rapper had berated Findling for working for Trump. “That’s what the rep said, but Cardi’s been really, like, super supportive of me,” he says.
On American television he has insisted that Trump’s controversial “I just want to find 11,780 votes” call contained nothing illegal, but declined to explain how he’d argue that in court. In a statement last year he suggested that the Georgia investigation amounted to “erroneous and politically driven persecution”.
Speaking to me, he stresses that Trump is yet to be charged of any wrongdoing by the Georgia authorities. “Our client has never been subpoenaed. He’s never been asked to come forward. He’s never been asked for an interview.”
Findling suggests that the case is an unwelcome distraction for a justice system that is already overburdened, as rates of violent crime have spiked in Atlanta. “My county and my community did not need this. We have plenty of other fish to fry - we have a lot of issues and this case has absorbed resources, it has absorbed money, it has absorbed time.”
The courthouse where the Trump trial would take place, he says, “in many ways is shut down” already because of another sprawling case, involving a rapper called YSL (it’s short for Young Slime Life), where several people are charged with violent crimes that include attempted armed robbery and murder. “And there are other cases of that magnitude that can’t get to trial. Now you’re going to burden this community with this [the Trump] case?”
When it comes to his rapper clientele, he says that he sets boundaries. He doesn’t go to clubs and he says no client has seen him with a drink in his hand. “It’s really important to make sure they understand you’re not one of them,” he says. “You’re still a lawyer. So I’m not hanging out with them. I don’t go to dinner with them. Maybe, on occasion, we’ll go to an event - but it’s usually a really cool event, like a black tie event that I can take my wife to.”
A not dissimilar code of compartmentalisation is, it seems, behind his decision to represent Trump. On Twitter he has previously called the former president “pathetic” and “racist”. He tells me that the events of January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington in an attempt to prevent the Senate from making Biden president, “hurt my heart, it hurt my soul. You know, I mean, I’m like anybody else. I may be critical, as a criminal defence attorney, of this country. But I’m an American.”
Does he believe that Trump was responsible? “I can’t talk about that. That is a case other lawyers are working on [it’s the case that Trump pleaded not guilty to this month]. I’m really focused on Fulton County, my team is focused on this jurisdiction.”
Meanwhile, Trump has turned his attention to Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County who has led the investigation against him. He has been claiming for weeks that Willis, who is black, is a racist. More recently he escalated hostilities with an apparently baseless claim that she had had an “affair” with a “gang member” she was prosecuting.
He has also told his supporters in fundraising emails that he expects to be indicted in the state and has urged them to give towards his defence fund. (Trump’s political fundraising machine is thought to have spent dollars 40 million this year alone on legal fees.)
In Findling’s law firm office he has three portrait paintings. One is of Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and another is of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who also sat on the court, only the second woman to do so. However, it’s the third that sums up his thinking on Trump. It’s of John Adams, the founding father who served as the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. Before his presidency, Adams was a leader of the revolution against Britain. But he was also devoted to the right to counsel and presumption of innocence - and he successfully defended British soldiers against murder charges after the Boston Massacre of 1770, where British troops had shot into a crowd of hundreds of Americans.
“It was an incredibly controversial case that defined him,” Findling tells me. Among US criminal defence lawyers Adams remains a legend, he says. “In our system of justice, when one person starts turning down cases because of ideology, then it’s a domino effect. And then nobody takes cases.”
Choosing to be a defence attorney means you will meet plenty of bad guys, he adds. “We sit across from people who are sometimes charged with the most heinous crimes. We don’t identify with those crimes - but we don’t let it influence whether or not we get involved in the case. I can’t let my mind go there. I just have to keep my focus looking forward. That’s part of achieving longevity in this profession.”
THE TIMES
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