When Jody Owens assembled his legal team, he did not go local. He went to Washington and hired W. Gary Kohlman, a trial attorney whose career spans five decades of high-stakes federal criminal work. Kohlman trained at the Public Defender Service in Washington, argued before the United States Supreme Court, trained Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, and built one of the most respected white-collar defense practices in the capital. He represented figures from the ABSCAM-era political scandals, defended a CIA translator convicted of selling classified documents to China, and spent years as general counsel to the National Basketball Players Association. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine described him plainly: "Gary Kohlman is one of the country's best trial lawyers."

Alongside Kohlman, Owens retained local attorneys Gerry Bufkin and Rob McDuff. The three formed a formidable team, and among those watching the Jackson bribery case closely, the expectation was that Kohlman would set the tempo in the courtroom, and that the attorneys representing Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Aaron Banks would, to varying degrees, benefit from the arguments Kohlman built. When you go to trial with the most aggressive and credentialed lawyer in the room, the others sometimes move in your orbit.

That calculus collapsed Monday when Owens pleaded guilty and walked out of the case entirely.

Lumumba's defense is now led by Jackson attorney Thomas Bellinder alongside Detroit lawyers Gerald Evelyn and Jeffrey Edison. Edison is a Super Lawyers-rated criminal defense attorney in Michigan with a national practice background. A committee formed in early 2025 to help fund Lumumba's legal bills estimated the cost of a high-quality defense at up to $750,000. Lumumba attended a fundraiser in Detroit organized by the Committee to Defend Chokwe Antar Lumumba. Asked in April how much the committee had raised, Lumumba declined to say. The fundraising itself signals that the financial burden of a six-week federal trial is real.

Banks is represented by Jackson attorney E. Carlos Tanner III of Tanner and Associates and S. Thomas Rich of Savant and Rich in Madison. Tanner has been aggressive in pretrial filings, including the motion filed last week arguing that Count Three of the indictment is duplicitous and must be corrected before trial. That motion reveals something about Banks's core posture: he is not arguing entrapment. He is arguing actual innocence.

That distinction matters more now than it did three weeks ago. Owens's defense was built on entrapment. His lawyers argued that federal agents plied him with alcohol and manipulated him into conduct he would not otherwise have engaged in. Banks's own attorneys saw that strategy as a liability. In a filing seeking a separate trial, Banks's counsel wrote that Owens's intent to pursue entrapment "to an unduly fair degree clashes with Mr. Banks' defense of actual innocence," warning that Owens's lawyers would be permitted to introduce "otherwise patently irrelevant factual claims" that Banks would have no evidentiary recourse to counter. The three defendants were not operating as a unified front. They had different theories of the case.

Now there is no entrapment argument in the courtroom. Owens dropped it when he pleaded guilty. What replaces it is the question both remaining defendants have to answer without the cover of the most prepared legal team in the group.

Lumumba's clearest pretrial argument has been a motion to dismiss claiming his conduct does not constitute an "official act" as defined by the Supreme Court's McDonnell v. United States decision. He argues that a phone call he made to a city employee while on a yacht in Fort Lauderdale, instructing that person to adjust a proposal deadline, was not sufficient to prove he wielded government power in exchange for a bribe. The motion was not granted, and the case is proceeding to trial, but the "official act" argument is likely to remain central to how his attorneys frame his conduct to the jury.

What Kohlman's departure actually removes is harder to quantify than it looks. The entrapment defense he was presumably building required years of high-level federal defense work to execute well. It required understanding how undercover operations are structured, where to find the seams in FBI procedure, and how to make a jury uncomfortable with the government's conduct rather than the defendant's. Lumumba and Banks were never going to run that play. But they were going to benefit if it created doubt in the jury box.

Now they build their own defense, from scratch, against a prosecution that opens its case two weeks from Monday with recorded audio and video, $80,000 in documented payments, and a cooperating witness who knows every conversation that happened along the way. Whether Owens testifies is not confirmed, but he has admitted the facts of the scheme under oath. His plea agreement requires him to cooperate with investigators. Every lawyer in that courtroom on July 13 is going to be working in his shadow.