Donald Trump has moved to a group of lesser-known civil litigators as his personal lawyers, and they have already taken steps that would be unusual for any president, much less one who leads the government they are fighting in court. Those lawyers have sued journalists and pressed cases against the same government Trump now controls.
That shift matters now because it marks a break from the bigger-name counsel Trump leaned on before and shows how much he values aggression over pedigree. In Trump’s view, the lawyers around him are useful because they will make arguments others might refuse, a quality that has made them central to his second presidency even as it raises questions about how far a president can shape the legal fights that surround him.
The group’s rise has put Boris Epshteyn at the center of the orbit. He is described by people involved in the legal world around Trump as a pugnacious longtime adviser, and those same accounts place him at the middle of the network of lawyers who have worked together on Trump’s behalf. The result is not just a tighter personal legal team, but one built around loyalty, repetition and a willingness to test lines that more established attorneys may not cross.
The problem with that arrangement is obvious in the machinery around the Justice Department. Trump has asserted greater control over it than previous presidents, which means proceedings that normally pit one side against another can feature lawyers on both sides who answer to him. That is an awkward fit for a system built on adversaries, and it helps explain why the people handling his legal business now are often the ones most willing to keep pushing.
During the 2024 transition, incoming White House counsel David Warrington recommended that Trump cut ties with Epshteyn. The warning underscores the same pressure running through Trump’s legal world: the desire for lawyers loyal enough to fight hard, and the danger that the fight gets tangled when the president sits close enough to both sides of the table.
Ty Cobb, who represented Trump during the Russia probe in 2016 and is now a fierce critic of him, offered a blunt measure of how much the circle has changed. “Boris was a nobody when I was there,” Cobb said. That line lands because it captures both the speed of Epshteyn’s rise and the broader story around Trump’s personal legal counsel: influence now seems to flow less from courtroom stature than from proximity, trust and the willingness to do what others will not.
What happens next will depend less on a single filing than on whether Trump keeps rewarding that style of lawyering. If he does, the unusual setup around his personal legal counsel may become less of an exception than a feature of how his presidency handles conflict.
