An attorney working Donald Trump’s legal team has quit, citing in-fighting among the former president’s inner circle.
Timothy Parlatore left his role this week, according to The New York Times, after working for Mr Trump for at least a year.
In an interview with CNN on Saturday, Mr Parlatore explained that the reason for his departure was ongoing friction with Boris Epshteyn, another legal adviser to Mr Trump.
Mr Epshteyn, according to Mr Parlatore, has been stonewalling the legal team in their attempts to ascertain whether all presidential records that Mr Trump took with him when he left the White House had been turned over to the National Archives.
The removal of official presidential records by Mr Trump led to the Justice Department’s raid of his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, last fall.
Mr Epshteyn “attempted to interfere” with attorneys’ efforts to search Mar-a-Lago for more documents, Mr Parlatore said.
The advisor also “served as kind of a filter to prevent us from getting information to the client”, feeding Mr Trump his own opinions instead, Mr Parlatore told CNN.
“The real reason is because there are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be. 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,” said Mr Parlatore.
“In my opinion, he was not very honest with us or with the client on certain things,” he added.
Mr Trump’s team denied Mr Parlatore’s characterisation of the events leading to his departure.
“Mr. Parlatore is no longer a member of the legal team. His statements regarding current members of the legal team are unfounded and categorically false,” a spokesperson told CNN.
The legal issues of Mr Trump remain under intense scrutiny after he announced his third presidential campaign for the White House in 2024.
Earlier this month, Mr Trump was found liable in a civil lawsuit over the sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s.
At one point during his deposition, Mr Trump appeared to confuse an image of Ms Carroll with his ex-wife, Marla Maples after previously claiming that Ms Carroll was not his “type”.
Mr Trump is facing a host of other legal battles, both criminal and civil, which threaten him and his business empire.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating a civil fraud case against the Trump Organization and the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting him for hush payments he allegedly directed to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
In Georgia, Fulton County’s District Attorney Fani Willis is deliberating whether to prosecute Mr Trump or members of his team for their attempts to overturn the state’s presidential election results in 2020.
