The recent news that President Trump has added Kenneth Starr, Robert Ray, and Alan Dershowitz to his impeachment defense team should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the arc of his career or theirs.

Let's start with Kenneth Starr, the former Independent Counsel who was appointed to investigate President Clinton. This latter day Inspector Javert spent six years and $70 million of public funds and came up with what? Evidence that Clinton had had consensual oral sex with a White House intern and had then lied about it during a deposition. Clinton's conduct was inexcusable, but that's not the point. Starr's investigation resulted in Clinton's impeachment on these charges, charges so de minimis in the context of our constitutional system that the Senate ultimately dismissed them, notwithstanding that they were true. In 2007, Starr became part of Jeffrey Epstein's defense team and helped to secure the now infamous deal that resulted in Epstein's plea of guilty to one minor state offense and immunity from federal prosecution notwithstanding that—as is now well-established—he had raped as many as hundreds of under age girls. In 2010, Starr became President of Baylor University and in 2014, its Chancellor as well. In 2016, he resigned from all of his posts at Baylor after he "willingly accepted responsibility" for the University's failure to investigate and otherwise respond to multiple allegations of rape perpetrated by members of the University's football team. As Hannah Arendt once aptly wrote:  "… crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."

Then there's Robert Ray (full disclosure—a former colleague of mine at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York) who batted clean-up for Starr, writing the Independent Counsel's report on Clinton after Starr left office for a teaching post at Pepperdine University. Ray was recently quoted as telling Fox Business Network reporter Maria Bartiromo that the impeachment of Trump "is an entirely partisan and therefore illegitimate effort by House Democrats to remove a president from office." Shall we talk about partisanship? Let's. Ray stepped down from the Independent Counsel position on March 13, 2002. On March 15, 2002, Ray announced that he would seek the Republican nomination to run for one of New Jersey's two U.S. Senate seats. Eighteen days later he dropped out of the race after raising hardly any money and after outraged calls that he step down from Democrats in Congress charging that Ray had made preliminary inquiries regarding a Senate campaign while still the "Independent" Counsel. At that point I thought that we had, thankfully, heard the last from/of Robert Ray. I was wrong. In 2006, Ray surrendered to police on charges that he had stalked a former girlfriend, whom he had allegedly e-mailed, called, and visited against her wishes after their relationship ended. According to his ex, Ray had lied to her while they were dating, claiming that he was divorced when that was not the case. The records of this case are sealed. So none of us knows the outcome and whether the allegations were true.

And finally, there's Alan Dershowitz (full disclosure—I took two criminal law courses from him at Harvard Law School and was a paid research assistant for him on his private cases while I was third-year student there). Dershowitz started his career as a liberal firebrand. But he made his name a household word by defending men accused of murdering or sexually assaulting women, e.g., Claus von Bulow, Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson. And then he teamed up with Kenneth Starr to defend serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein, taking the lead role in negotiating the flawed plea agreement, supra, that allowed Epstein to walk away from unfathomable wrongdoing almost entirely unscathed. One of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre, has publicly accused Dershowitz of having had sex with her while she was a minor, a charge Dershowitz vehemently denies. Dershowitz does admit staying at Epstein's Palm Beach spread and receiving a massage there, although he says the masseuse was an adult and he kept his underwear on. And now, for the last few years, Dershowitz has become a flack and an apologist for Donald Trump, defending him at just about every turn, anytime cable news will give him an opportunity to appear and hold forth on screen.

Why choose these men to represent you? Republican Washington, D.C. attorney George Conway (husband of presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway) has argued that Trump is consigned to them because he stiffed every reputable attorney he turned to to represent him in the past and because he is such a mercurial, unmanageable client that no attorney concerned about his own good name and reputation would take him on as a client. That may be the case. But there are other reasons that may very well explain Trump's decision to bring these men on to his impeachment defense team. First, they are all Trump sycophants, and there is no end to the ego-feeding this damaged narcissist requires to sustain him. Second, as one who has been accused of sexually assaulting numerous women himself, he sees in them kindred souls and readily identifies with them: with Starr, who defended the serial rapist Epstein and then presided over a university that ignored the complaints of female students that they were being raped; with Ray, who was accused of stalking an ex-girlfriend; and with Dershowitz, who has defended numerous accused rapists and wife-murderers, and who himself has been accused of having had sex with an underage minor. What a sad day for the country and the legal profession—that we have this president and these lawyers defending him.

Elliott B. Jacobson was an Assistant District Attorney in New York County from 1980 to 1985 and an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1985 to 2017.