Arrested Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier picked a lawyer with powerful acquaintances in the White House and the Justice Department as he faces charges in the NBA gambling scandal.
Rozier’s lawyer Jim Trusty represented the president after the 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid in the Trump classified documents case and the January 6 cases that both imploded, as well as Trump’s defamation suit against CNN (a Florida judge tossed the suit against the network in 2023).
Trusty dropped off the cases in June 2023, citing “irreconcilable differences,” although Trump thanked him at the time and said he had been up against a “sick’” group of people. When he stepped down from the classified documents case, he was replaced by Todd Blanche, who is now the No. 2 at DOJ.
Trusty has experience in complex white-collar defense matters, but it is likely that his expertise with RICO cases and the mob that influenced the embattled player’s selection of him. Trusty ran DOJ’s Organized Crime section for six years during the Obama administration.
Just as he did while advocating for Trump, Trusty came out swinging against federal prosecutors – in a case where Rozier is accused of conspiracy to commit fraud in an alleged sports betting scheme where prosecutors say associates wagered more than $200,000 that he would underperform in a 2023 game.
Trusty accused prosecutors of wanting “the misplaced glory of embarrassing a professional athlete with a perp walk. That tells you a lot about the motivations in this case,” he sneered in a Thursday statement.
“Terry was cleared by the NBA and these prosecutors revived that non-case,” he said of the now infamous game between the Charlotte Hornets and the New Orleans Pelicans, where Rozier left after playing just 10 minutes in a game that flagged “unusual betting activity,” according to a January NBA statement.
Prosecutors allege he told a friend he was going to “prematurely remove himself in the first quarter” for the purposes of “enabling” the friend to wager on his performance.
“Terry is not a gambler, but he is not afraid of a fight, and he looks forward to winning this fight,” Trusty added.
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