When assembling the legal team for his Senate impeachment trial, President Trump called up some old friends: Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer for the late Jeffrey Epstein and the author of “The Case Against Impeaching Trump”; Ken Starr, whom, during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, Trump referred to as a “lunatic”; and two lawyers who defended the President during the Russia probe, Jane Raskin and Jay Sekulow. “We’ve got the band back together!” Raskin said to CNN, before the hearings began last week. “Jay is definitely the leader of the band.”
It’s a familiar role for Sekulow, who, for the past several years, has played drums and rhythm guitar in his own rock group, the Jay Sekulow Band. The Jay Sekulow Band often performs on “Jay Sekulow Live!,” a daily syndicated radio show hosted by Jay Sekulow and his son Jordan Sekulow. The group does dad-band covers of classic-rock tunes, and some Christian-tinged originals. Their version of the Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just Alright” has more than a million views on Facebook. Their original song “Where I Stand” (“Father in Heaven hear our prayer / Strengthen your souls lost in despair”) has fewer. The comments section of the band’s Facebook page is a mishmash of true and false: one fan thought that Sekulow was a congressman; another identified him as a born-again Christian and the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice. Another wrote, “Congas need to be up in the mix more but otherwise you guys sound great.”
The Jay Sekulow Band specializes in the timely posting of songs that function as commentaries on the news. In October, after the story of Trump’s Ukraine phone call broke, Sekulow posted a video of his band performing the R. & B. classic “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The video opens with a shot of the Capitol, followed by clips of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff talking impeachment, and one of Lindsey Graham complaining that the whole thing is based on hearsay. Cut to the Jay Sekulow Band in its studio (guitars hanging on the walls, Oriental rugs). Sekulow pounds away on the drums in a black T-shirt, his dark hair perfect, separated from the other band members by a glass drum shield. And in 2016, right after Trump tweeted that Hillary Clinton was a “PATHOLOGICAL LIAR” for phumphering about her use of a private e-mail server, Sekulow posted the band playing the Three Dog Night hit “Liar.” (Debbie Landers, a fan who is a retired nurse in St. Louis, said, “I do like how he can find a song that matches the kind of folks that he and we as a nation deal with.”) The whole band wails on the chorus—“Li-ar!”—with Sekulow crashing the cymbals each time. Visible on his wrist, during closeups, is a Beatles edition Raymond Weil watch that has song titles where the numbers should be.
Like Trump’s legal team, Sekulow’s band was conceived as a sort of supergroup, a C-list Traveling Wilburys. To glam up his legal-pad demeanor, Sekulow recruited several stars from the Christian-rock scene: John Elefante, of the band Kansas (a recent hit: “Pass the Flame”); John Schlitt (“God Is Too Big”), of Head East; and Mark Lee Townsend, of DC Talk, which is a regular on the Jesus Freak Cruise.
“Jay’s lineup of superstars is outstanding,” Scott Cameron, a fan in California, said over the phone. “I don’t know how he brought those guys into the fold. You’d think these guys would be drugged-up rock stars from the seventies who are long gone, but no!” Cameron likes to watch the band’s live performances on its Facebook page. “When you see Jay on the drums, he seems very staid,” Cameron said.
Vance Jorgensen, a personal-injury lawyer in Iowa and Minnesota who found the band through his love of Head East, said that he has managed to separate the Jay Sekulow Band from its politics. He just likes the songs. “I respect Jay for what he’s put together,” Jorgensen said. “He’s bringing in the actual guys who were doing concert tours back in the late sixties, early seventies. Perhaps as time goes on he’ll get a little more comfortable, step out front, do a little singing. Who knows?”
Sekulow did not appear too comfortable in his first week leading Trump’s defense in the impeachment trial. He was ridiculed for mischaracterizing the conclusions of the Mueller report and for garbling the articles of impeachment themselves, and he rambled on disjointedly after mishearing a remark by the opposing counsel. “Trump may have hired America’s dumbest lawyer in Jay Sekulow,” Jonathan Chait wrote, in New York. And Chief Justice John Roberts, who is known to be a Bob Dylan man, admonished both legal teams for their childish behavior.
The Jay Sekulow Band is on hiatus during the impeachment trial, but perhaps Cameron, the fan in California, has the right take: “You see Jay in the background, playing the drums, and he loves it to death—but he knows his place back there. He’s no Neil Peart.” ♦
