President Trump’s impeachment lawyer Jay Sekulow is a self-described “nice Jewish boy” who nonetheless worships Jesus Christ and believes divine providence brought him to defend Trump against impeachment.
“Everything I’ve worked on in my career has, in a sense, prepared me for this moment,” Sekulow said. “I see God’s hand in anything that takes place in my life.”
Sekulow, 63, spoke during an interview with the Forward, a Jewish-American publication where his great-uncle Sonya Sekular worked in the 1940s. “God’s hand” had brought him to defend the president from conviction in the Senate, Sekulow said, where he leads the president’s defense with White House counsel Pat Cipollone and a team of seven lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr.
Sekulow is a Messianic Jew — he believes that Jesus is the son of God — a belief he came to as a teenager after an encounter with Jews for Jesus on his college campus, a group for whom he would later argue a string of First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court. A 9-0 decision allowing Jews for Jesus to proselytize at the Los Angeles International Airport drew the attention of Trinity Broadcasting Network’s founders. They brought him into their organization, inviting him to guest-host their lead program Praise the Lord and later invested $3 million into Sekulow’s nonprofit organization, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism.
Trinity’s owners, Jan and Paul Crouch, would affectionately call him “our little Jew,” according to a report at the time, which Sekulow said he did not mind. “You have to take it in the context that they meant it,” he said. “They don’t mean it as an offense. They’re so excited that you’re Jewish.”
Meeting Sekulow, Paul Crouch said, was “God’s master-plan strategy to not only introduce wonderful Jewish people to Jesus Christ as Messiah but to unite Jews and Gentiles in a religious sense.”
Sekulow views his work through the lens of his faith, describing himself as a First Amendment “literalist” who still considers himself Jewish. He is opposed to prayer mandates in public elementary and middle schools.
“I always considered myself Jewish,” Sekulow said. “My heritage and my upbringing and my family’s faith, all of that plays a role in my view of justice.”
He met Trump, he said, under more pedestrian circumstances — at a charity event long before the 2016 campaign.
Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen accused Sekulow, 63, of directing him to lie to Congress, Cohen told lawmakers last year.
A report in 2017 found that Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism directed more than $60 million to Sekulow, his family members, and businesses connected to them since 2000.
