#Trump lawyer calls post attacking Bragg ‘ill-advised,’ says ‘I’m not his social media consultant’

Donald Trump’s lawyer on Sunday distanced himself from his clients’ escalating attacks on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as he weighs criminal charges against the former president.

“I’m not his social media consultant,” Joe Tacopina said in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” when pressed by host Chuck Todd whether he would advise a client to personally attack a prosecutor. “I think that was an ill-advised post that one of his social media people put up and he quickly took down when he realized the rhetoric and the photo that was attached to it.”

Todd responded, “You’re referring to the baseball bat thing, which of course, was featured in The New York Post cover. New York Post thought it was a pretty, pretty rough hit.”

Trump has in recent days stepped up his inflammatory rhetoric against the government officials investigating him after falsely predicting last weekend he would be arrested Tuesday in the case involving a hush money payment made during his 2016 campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Bragg is probing how the payments were documented on the books of the Trump Organization.

On Thursday, Trump called Bragg an “animal” backed by the liberal megadonor George Soros, who is Jewish, in a post to his social media platform Truth Social. In another Truth Social posting, he appears to have shared an article that contained an image of himself wielding a baseball bat juxtaposed next to an image of Bragg’s head. That post has since been deleted. Early Friday, Trump warned of “potential death and destruction” if he is charged in the hush money case.

Trump has maintained he committed no wrongdoing.

“I’m not going to defend or condemn anything regarding social media. That’s not what I do,” Tacopina said Sunday. “I don’t have anything to do… I’m not a Trump PR person. I’m a litigator and a lawyer, and I’m talking about this case in Manhattan.”

While the charges that could be brought against Trump are still unclear, Tacopina has maintained that the former president was following the advice of his then-lawyer Michael Cohen when he signed off on the payments that are being investigated by Bragg’s office. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges relating to the $130,000 payment in the final days of the 2016 campaign.

The Manhattan DA is now investigating Trump for felony falsification of business records. Cohen said that Trump directed him to pay Daniels the hush money for the “principal purpose of influencing” the election. Cohen later repaid the money he gave to Daniels through payments that were listed by Trump’s company as “legal fees.”

Tacopina has argued that the records weren’t falsified, saying that payments were made to Cohen, not Daniels, and therefore would be “considered legal fees.”

He also contended on “Meet the Press” that Trump used personal funds.

“The law is this: that if you use personal funds, and you’re involved in the campaign, the bright line test is ‘would you have expended that money, would you have made that payment, irrespective of the candidacy irrespective of the campaign? And the answer to that question is simply yes, this was a personal civil settlement,” Tacopina said.

He said “this has nothing to do with” if Trump paid the money through the Trump Organization or a corporation or his personal funds, adding “by all accounts there were personal funds.”

Daniels claimed the money was for the purpose of keeping her silent about her allegation that she’d slept with the married Trump in 2006, which Trump denies.

NBC News reported Friday that the FBI and NYPD are investigating a letter containing a death threat and white powder mailed to Bragg’s office, the latest in what a senior law enforcement source described as “several hundred threats” aimed at Bragg and his office in recent weeks.

Summer Concepcion

Summer Concepcion is a politics reporter for NBC News.

Dareh Gregorian contributed.