When President Donald Trump’s newest lawyer appeared in a Manhattan federal court on Friday, she had an apologetic message for the judge: I’m new around here.

“Now, I should say my firm was engaged Wednesday evening, April 11,” the president’s attorney, Joanna Hendon, told the presiding judge. “That’s a day and a half ago.”


The sudden enlistment of Hendon, a former federal prosecutor from New York, underscores Trump’s scramble to manage an expanding array of legal crises with a bare-bones legal team that has lacked a quarterback for nearly a month.

That could change soon: Multiple attorneys have offered to help with the president’s defense in the wake of last week’s FBI raid of longtime Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen, sources familiar with the matter say, and new lawyers could assume senior positions on his team as soon as this week. That would likely include one or more replacements for John Dowd, who resigned in March as the president’s top outside attorney.

Trump’s legal team has in effect been improvising for the past several weeks, a dangerous dynamic given his mounting woes: a federal criminal investigation into Cohen, the upcoming trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s examination of a potential obstruction of justice case against the president.

Several elite lawyers approached by Trump have rebuffed requests to join his team in recent weeks, leaving just two senior lawyers defending him: Ty Cobb, who runs the official White House response to the Russia probe and Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow, a talk radio show host and conservative lawyer best known for arguing First Amendment cases.

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“Would you help him?” asked Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior counsel to Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr now serving as a senior fellow at the nonprofit R Street Institute. “Everyone who works for Trump has a big ‘T’ burned on their forehead for the rest of their life.”

But in a Monday interview, Sekulow said that Hendon and her boutique Manhattan-based firm, Spears & Imes, is now on retainer to handle the Cohen matter — serving as “the New York team,” he said — but could be tapped later for other Mueller-related duties.

A Yale Law School graduate, Hendon has spent more than 20 years working on white-collar criminal cases, including as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. She also was a top attorney at Merrill Lynch and later worked as a partner with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which has represented Trump, since his election, on conflict of interest issues related to the Trump Organization.

Hendon was registered as a Republican in the 2012 election but by 2016 was listed on voter rolls as a Democrat, according to New York state election records. Her recent political donations have also leaned left — including nearly $2,000 over the past four cycles to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, according to Federal Election Commission data. Several of her friends and associates expressed surprise at seeing her join Trump’s legal team, but predicted she will avoid the reputational damage suffered by other attorneys and senior aides who have worked for the president.

“Some people might be upset with her for representing him in this limited role,” said Leslie Caldwell, a former senior Obama administration Justice Department official who helped recruit Hendon to work at Morgan, Lewis. “But I’m not worried she’s going to do anything that’s going to compromise her reputation or integrity. She’s not going to say things she doesn’t think are correct just because her client might want her to.”

Dowd departed on March 22 amid frustration that Trump was not heeding his advice about the danger of granting Mueller an in-person interview. Several other top defense attorneys have also turned down his job offers, some on multiple occasions, including former George W. Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson, Emmet Flood, William Burck, Robert Giuffra Jr., Reid Weingarten, Robert Bennett, Dan Webb and Tom Buchanan.

On Sunday, CNN reported Steven Molo, a former prosecutor based in New York, declined to sign on to Trump’s defense.

Several sources close to Trump said the president and his current legal team have been urged to lower their expectations about who might be willing to sign on.

“The smart thing to do is say, ‘OK, right now we can’t hire a general. Let’s get people in at the company commander level who can deal with the day to day,’” said one defense lawyer working with a senior Trump aide.

“I think they just need some bodies,” said Mark Corallo, a former George W. Bush-era Justice Department spokesman who briefly served last spring as press liaison for the Trump legal team.

Legal experts said Trump’s struggles are no real surprise given the way the temperamental, tweet-first president has repeatedly violated the wishes of his lawyers by discussing the case publicly and with his top aides.

"I understand why a lot of individual lawyers would be reticent to take the case," Corallo said. "It’s a large case. It’s all consuming. You will not have a lot of time for other business."

"And when you see the way the president has treated some of his attorneys, a lot of very senior lawyers would look at that and say, ‘I don’t need the aggravation. I’ve built a reputation and I’m not going to have my client purposefully embarrass me or humiliate me or be attacked by people within the White House on the president’s staff and those who are close to him who find their way on to the television screen and into the newspapers to carry messages from the president,'" Corallo added.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the notion he’s upset with his lawyers or struggling to keep his team in tact, though on Sunday he tweeted that the FBI’s raid on Cohen may be giving his lawyers new concerns.

“I have many (too many!) lawyers and they are probably wondering when their offices, and even homes, are going to be raided with everything, including their phones and computers, taken. All lawyers are deflated and concerned!” Trump wrote.

Despite the FBI raid, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Monday aboard Air Force One that Trump and Cohen continue to have a professional relationship.

“I believe they’ve still got some ongoing things, but the president has a large number of attorneys, as you know,” she said. She did not say which attorneys she was referring to.