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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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Joe Tacopina, an attorney who recently withdrew from representing Donald Trump in two cases, has said it is "absolutely" possible that the former president could be convicted.
Tacopina withdrew from the New York criminal case charging Trump with falsifying business records in connection to hush money payments made to a porn actress, as well as a separate appeal of the verdict in a lawsuit brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll.
Trump also faces three other criminal prosecutions, including a federal case charging him with working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. Another federal criminal case also brought by special counsel Jack Smith charges Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and obstructing government efforts to get them back. He is also charged in Georgia over efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.
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Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and decried the prosecutions as politically-motivated efforts to derail his bid to reclaim the White House.
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In his first interview since leaving Trump's legal team, Tacopina said on MSNBC that the federal cases are "serious."
"I think they're, they're not to be taken lightly, let's put it that way," Tacopina told the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Asked if it is possible that Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, could be convicted in one of the criminal cases, Tacopina replied: "Is it possible? Absolutely. You have a jury of 12 who's going to ultimately going to decide this."
In an email to Newsweek, Tacopina said that "anything is a possibility with a jury trial."
"I did not say that they would likely result in conviction," he said. "But of course any lawyer who has ever tried a case will tell you that any result is possible with a jury trial. It could result in a conviction, it could result in an acquittal, it could result in a hung jury."
On MSNBC, Tacopina also said that Trump will be facing trials in jurisdictions where he may not be very popular.
"I'd say maybe three of those venues are not particularly big Trump venues, right? New York City, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta," he said. "So that's going to be, you know, something to really have to grapple with there. And you can't say there's no way he'll get convicted. There's no way you know he'll be sentenced."
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