From Cardi B to Donald Trump: Meet the High-Flying, Liberal Lawyer Defending the Former President in Georgia

His public efforts on behalf of Trump, with partner Marissa Goldberg, have been fairly aggressive. When Findling’s hiring was announced last August he labeled Willis’s inquiry “an erroneous and politically driven persecution.” In February, he strongly criticized Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the Fulton County special purpose grand jury investigating Trump, for giving interviews. “This type of carnival, clown-like atmosphere that was portrayed over the course of the last 36 hours takes away from the complete sanctity and the integrity and, for that matter, the reliability [of the investigation],” Findling told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He followed up in March by filing a motion attacking Willis’s conduct and seeking to quash the grand jury’s final report. Obviously that didn’t work, and now the skirmishing will likely grow far more intense.

Findling, 63, has come a very long way from his scuffling childhood in Coram, New York, a blue-collar Long Island town, where, from the age of eight, he was raised by a single mother who worked as a grocery store cashier. A track scholarship took Findling to Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University; he stayed in town to attend law school at Emory. He went from the public defender’s office to his own firm, where, among many other cases, Findling won the battered spouse acquittal of a woman who had doused her husband with gasoline and set him on fire, and a not guilty verdict, on 27 felony counts, for Victor Hill, a county sheriff accused of racketeering (it was the Hill case, Findling says, that motivated another Trump Atlanta attorney, Jennifer Little, to reach out to him last year).

But it wasn’t until 2013 that Findling became a star beyond courthouse circles. He took on a client named Radric Davis, who had been arrested for hitting a soldier with a Champagne bottle in a nightclub. Findling wasn’t aware that Davis was far 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 point, struggling with drugs; Findling helped turn his life around, negotiating a federal plea deal for possession of a firearm by a felon, then attaining Gucci Mane’s early release from prison. Since then Findling has become a favorite of Atlanta rap royalty, including Waka Flocka Flame and Migos. He has always dressed the part, in a Miami Vice kind of way, with slick-backed hair, dark sunglasses, and windowpane suits; Findling’s Instagram page, run by one of his sons, has picked up 240,000 followers.

So when Cardi B was charged with felony assault in connection with the attacks on two women in a Queens strip club, her husband, Georgia-native rapper Offset, knew just the guy for her to call. The case dragged on for four years, but Cardi ultimately pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. “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 a fiercely outspoken Democrat who endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election cycle; what does she make of Findling taking on Trump as a client? “No comment,” Holiday says. (A representative for Cardi told The New Yorker that “she gave him shit about it.” “She did not,” Findling tells me. “She’s been 100% supportive.”)

“I am not a ‘rapper’ attorney,” Findling says, estimating that hip-hop clients are a mere 5% of his firm’s business and pointing to major commodities trading and political corruption cases on its record. The Trump case, though, is the one that is giving Findling a national profile and that is calling into question the consistency of his ideals. In 2020, Findling posted a nearly five-minute video invoking the memory of his recently deceased mother as he passionately praised the Black Lives Matter movement. Last June, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, he declared on Instagram that he would “commit my law firm to fighting to restore a woman’s right to choose which has been destroyed by the Supreme Court.” Defending Trump—who Findling’s firm has so far billed for at least $800,000—would seem to run counter to those values. “I believe in this defense, and I believe in everything we’re saying,” he says. “It has nothing at all to do with the past—it has to do with this case, and my commitment to my client’s innocence in this case. Which I believe in.”