His public efforts on behalf of Trump, with partners Marissa Goldberg, were pretty aggressive. When Findling’s hiring was announced last August, he called Willis’ investigation “an erroneous and politically motivated prosecution.” In February he sharply criticized it Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the Fulton County special grand jury investigating Trump for giving interviews. “The kind of carnivalesque clownish atmosphere portrayed over the course of the past 36 hours takes away from complete sanctity, integrity and, for that matter, reliability.” [of the investigation]’ Findling told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In March, he then filed a motion attacking Willis’ conduct and seeking to nullify the grand jury’s final report. Obviously that didn’t work, and now the banter is likely to intensify a lot more.
Findling, 63, has come a long way since his turbulent childhood in Coram, New York, a working class town on Long Island, where he was raised from the age of eight by a single mother who worked as a cashier at a grocery store. A track scholarship took Findling to Oglethorpe University in Atlanta; He stayed in town to study law at Emory. He moved from the office of public defender to his own law firm, where Findling acquitted, among many other cases, the acquittal of a woman who doused her husband with petrol and set him on fire as a battered wife and of a 27-year crime, e.g Victor Hill, a county sheriff accused of racketeering (it was the Hill case, Findling says, that motivated another Trump attorney from Atlanta), Jennifer Little, to reach him last year).
But it wasn’t until 2013 that Findling became a star beyond the court circles. He accepted a client named Radric Davis, who had been arrested for hitting a soldier with a champagne bottle in a nightclub. Findling was unaware that Davis was much better known as Gucci Mane or that the alleged victim was apparently a fan who wanted a photo with Gucci. The trap pioneer was at a low ebb and struggled with drugs; Findling helped turn his life around by negotiating a federal plea deal for gun ownership by a felon and then securing Gucci Mane’s parole from prison. Since then, Findling has become a favorite of Atlanta’s rap kings, including Waka Flocka flame and Migos. He always dressed the role in Miami Vice style, with straight hair, dark sunglasses and window suits; Findling’s Instagram page, run by one of his sons, has 240,000 followers.
When Cardi B was charged with aggravated assault in connection with the attacks on two women at a Queens strip club, so was her husband, a Georgia-born rapper offset, knew exactly the man to call. The case dragged on for four years, but Cardi eventually pleaded guilty to two counts. “Cardi thinks Drew is the best lawyer she’s ever worked with, and she also considers him a friend,” says her manager. Shawn Holiday. The rapper is an extremely outspoken Democrat in support of this Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election cycle; What does she think of Findling taking Trump as a client? “No comment,” says Holiday. (A Cardi rep told The New Yorker, “She didn’t give him a damn about it.” “She didn’t,” Findling tells me. “She supported him 100%.”)
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“I’m not a ‘rapper’ lawyer,” Findling says, estimating that hip-hop clients make up just 5% of his firm’s business and citing major commodity trading and political corruption cases on the record. The Trump case, however, is the one that gives Findling a national profile and challenges the consistency of his ideals. In 2020, Findling released a nearly five-minute video in which he commemorated his recently deceased mother and passionately praised the Black Lives Matter movement. Last June, following the overturning of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade on Instagram that he will “oblige my law firm to fight to restore a woman’s right to vote that was destroyed by the Supreme Court.” Defending Trump — whom Findling’s firm has so far billed at least $800,000 — would run counter to those values. “I believe in this defense and I believe in everything we say,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the past – it has to do with this case and my commitment to my client’s innocence in this case. What I believe in.”
