The ex-presidents legal team is in trouble.

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In the latest addition to Donald Trump’s mounting legal woes, attorney Timothy Parlatore just announced his resignation from the presidents former legal team. Parlatore said he was forced to resign because it was impossible to work with co-counsel Boris Epshteyn. According to Parlatore, Epshteyn did everything to try to block us [from speaking to Trump], and not very loyal to the client. Why is Mr. Epshteyn, a longtime Trump aide, former corporate lawyer and political commentator with no apparent criminal defense experience remains a mystery, though one can guess from the Parlatore quote it’s because he’s telling Trump what he wants to hear.

Parlatores’ departure follows that of Evan Corcoran, a Trump lawyer who resigned from the Mar-a-Lago investigation after being forced to testify in a grand jury against his client over classified documents. Despite resigning from the Mar-a-Lago investigation, Corcoran will remain an adviser to the former president on other investigations. While Parlatore was also forced to testify at the grand jury, he apparently saw no ethical or practical obstacles to his continuing to work for Trump until Epshteyn irritated him enough to trigger his departure. Parlatore and Corcoran are both wrong.

As a white-collar criminal defense attorney for four decades, I cannot fathom how any attorney who testified in a grand jury investigation of a client can remain that client’s attorney. Justice Department lawyers did not subpoena Parlatore and Corcoran after randomly pulling their names from the phone book. They were subpoenaed because the DOJ definitely had substantial evidence implicating them in their client’s criminal behavior. Otherwise, there is no way to successfully litigate the matter over months to break the attorney-client privilege under the criminal fraud exception. Unless the DOJ and the judges who uphold the criminal fraud exemption are widely off the mark, there are only two possible outcomes: The lawyer becomes a witness against the client or is indicted as his accomplice.

In grand jury testimony, the attorney/witness must be careful not to expose himself to charges of perjury, while the attorneys own underlying conduct is also scrutinized. How can the client maintain full confidence in the attorney if the client does not actually know if the attorney provided damaging evidence that will be used to incarcerate him? How does the client know if the lawyer is protecting his own interests instead of the client’s? In the Corcoran situation, how could providing testimony that might help a prosecutor impeach his client on one matter not destroy the attorney-client relationship on all counts? By nature, lawyers have to protect themselves which necessarily conflicts to at least some material level with their obligation to protect their client. This conflict seriously undermines a relationship that requires full disclosure, mutual trust, and a shared determination to always put the clients’ interests first.

In other words, when a subpoenaed attorney fails or attempts to do everything legally possible to avoid the need to testify, there is no choice but to terminate the attorney-client relationship.

So, the general takeaway from the Parlatores exit is that Team Trump can now be called Team Turmoil. In addition to the loss of Corcoran and Parlatore, it can be expected that Joe Tacopina, Trumps attorney in the E. Jean Carroll civil assault litigation will soon be gone, although in his case, not voluntarily. If any of these three new Trump legal exiles join their former Team Trump colleagues who have abandoned ship in making public, negative reviews of their former client defense team and his chances to defend himself as successfully as former Trump White House top lawyer Ty Cobb, who predicted his former client would go to jail to see.

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In any event, given the extraordinary number of Trump lawyers who may have pushed or jumped the defense window of former presidents, we can now add a dysfunctional defense team to the former president’s legal problems that I previously identified in Slate. We begin with Trump’s astonishing inability to testify on his own behalf. Indeed, the degree to which his deposition testimony was used as a battering ram against him at the Carroll trial, and his hilarious remarks and inadvertent admissions at a CNN Town Hall that were likely premeditated by his self-immolation lawyers, strongly emphasizes the point. In addition to these severe personal limitations, we can add some predictably flawed tactical decisions, including recommending Eastern District of New York Judge Raymond Dearie to be Mar-a-Lago Special Master and the problematic selection of Joe Tacopina as lead counsel in Carroll’s case. As Special Master, Judge Dearie gave the DOJ everything it wanted while giving Team Trump nothing but well-reasoned criticism. As the lead defense attorney in the disastrous Carroll trial, Tacopinas’ stellar performance was widely criticized by the media, and by his client after the verdict.

While each manifests itself in different ways, all of these obstacles to the former president’s ability to defend himself stem from the same source: Donald Trump. As my former law partner Ken Kaplan and I used to say when dealing with difficult clients, you can often protect a client from the government, but you can’t protect him from himself. With this in mind, we can certainly expect more self-inflicted wounds to emerge as investigations wind down and pressure mounts on the former president.

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