The Trump Presidency
Why so much need for lawyers?

“A TARGET, NOT A WITNESS”: WILL TRUMP’S LEGAL B-TEAM COLLAPSE BEFORE MUELLER? ... The president’s struggle to recruit experienced lawyers could mask more ominous concerns.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

“A TARGET, NOT A WITNESS”: WILL TRUMP’S LEGAL B-TEAM COLLAPSE BEFORE MUELLER?

The president’s struggle to recruit experienced lawyers could mask more ominous concerns. “As far as I can tell, Ty Cobb is the only attorney left on the Trump team with experience handling federal criminal investigations,” says one former prosecutor. “The team is thinner than you might expect for perhaps the most important investigation of our lifetime.”


Donald Trump By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images.

At the very moment when Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is spinning into higher gear, Donald Trump’s legal team is falling apart in extraordinary fashion. John Dowd, the president’s lead personal lawyer, resigned last week. Ty Cobb, who is running point for the White House on everything Russia, is on the outs. Even Joseph diGenova, the shit-kicking conspiracy theorist who was expected to join the team, unexpectedly bowed out Sunday, alongside his wife, Fox News regular Victoria Toensing, citing undefined conflicts. (The New York Times reported that Trump did not believe he had “personal chemistry” with the couple.) “I don’t think you have seen anything like this,” said former Obama general counsel Bob Bauer, struggling to identify a historical antecedent. “Like so much else around Trump, [the shake-up] is marked by confusion, a lack of consistency, and an apparent reflection of the president’s uncontrolled impulses.”

Trump’s personal legal team now consists of just one full-time attorney—Jay Sekulow—a remarkably shallow bench for a president facing potential obstruction of justice charges and the prospect of impeachment. “As far as I can tell, Ty Cobb is the only attorney left on the Trump team with experience handling federal criminal investigations,” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who has been closely following the probe. “The team is thinner than you might expect for perhaps the most important investigation of our lifetime.”

One of the most critical questions, in the wake of Dowd’s departure, is who is handling negotiations over Trump’s potential interview with Mueller. For months, Dowd had been in contact with the special counsel over the issue, which had reportedly emerged as a sticking point. Dowd was rightly worried about the president testifying under oath, given his penchant for mistruths and exaggerations. Trump, however, has publicly and privately signaled an eagerness to face Mueller. With Dowd out, it is unclear where those negotiations stand. “Cobb can’t do it because he doesn’t represent Trump personally and no one else currently on the team has any experience in this area,” noted William Jeffress, an attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case. Sekulow has reportedly tried to recruit more experienced lawyers, but none have yet signed on. Trump himself recently met with veteran Republican lawyers Emmet Flood and Theodore Olson, but both declined to take the case. Later Monday, it was reported that Tom Buchanan and Dan Webb were the latest prominent lawyers to decline to work for Trump.

Trump’s inability to assemble or maintain an experienced legal team could prove crippling if he is forced to square off against Mueller, a fearsome federal prosecutor assisted by “16 of the best lawyers in the country.” Cobb and Dowd were the only members of the team with the relevant credentials. Sekulow rose to prominence as a conservative commentator and for his work on religious-freedom cases through his work with the American Center for Law and Justice. A team of roughly a half dozen individuals, also affiliated with the conservative nonprofit, are reported to be working with Sekulow on Trump’s defense on a part-time basis. “You wouldn’t go to an ear and nose and throat specialist to perform heart surgery,” Bauer told me. “It is an odd notion that you just reach out and recruit lawyers that you are personally comfortable with . . . rather than select the people that have the experience and the training to address the very specific problem that you face.”

Bauer was withering when asked about the possibility that fellow New York attorney Marc Kasowitz might rejoin Trump’s team, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported last week. “There is nothing I know of that qualifies Mr. Kasowitz to take something like this on except that the president knows him and has had a good experience with him in the areas in which Mr. Kasowitz does practice.”

It is incredible to imagine that the president of the United States—a billionaire—should be unable to secure proper representation. But Trump is hardly the ordinary presidential client. A tightfisted septuagenarian with an itchy Twitter finger, Trump is as infamous for stiffing contractors as he is for his mean streak—hardly winsome character traits for top-flight attorneys with their choice of assignments. “You’re kidding right?” one Washington defense lawyer spat last year when I asked about the challenges of representing Trump. “Representing this guy would be almost an impossibility. I mean I don’t know who would want to do that.”

Hours before news broke that diGenova and Toensing would not be joining his legal team, Trump tried to throw cold water on the narrative that he couldn’t find a good lawyer. “Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case . . . don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on,” he wrote Sunday on Twitter. “Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted.” But other members of the bar are skeptical. “If he says many lawyers are willing to work for him, that may only be true because we have a country with a huge number of lawyers in it,” Bauer said. “But how many of the willing ones would have the credentials and experience for the job?” Other members of the White House, after all, have had no trouble securing representation. White House counsel Donald McGahn, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and erstwhile chief of staff Reince Priebus are all being represented by William Burck, for example. (Burck reportedly turned down a chance to work for the president.) Abbe Lowell, another heavy hitter, is representing Jared Kushner.

Trump, meanwhile, keeps giving prospective law firms more reasons not to work with him. “Trump’s latest tweets reflect his low opinion of lawyers which is only one reason lawyers who care about their reputation don’t want to represent him,” Jeffress told me. “He will no doubt find a lawyer eager to represent him but most lawyers are not.”

Given the sheer number of lawyers representing clients in Mueller’s probe, it is possible, too, that a small town like Washington is simply running out of white-shoe firms without conflicts. That was, after all, the reason that diGenova and Toensing ostensibly parted ways with Trump. Toensing has been representing Mark Corallo, who represented Trump’s legal team last year, before resigning in the wake of revelations about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer.

Such a prosaic explanation, however, could mask more ominous concerns. “What happened between last week, when DiGenova and Toensing were announced as joining the team, and yesterday?” mused Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Obama. “The conflict of interest issue was apparent on Tuesday, and yet we were told they were joining the team and that Mark Corallo (the person with the most significant conflict) had waived any concern. Then Dowd resigns Thursday, and yet by Sunday DiGenova and Toensing are gone, leaving the president with only two lawyers.” That strange development, Katyal posited to me, suggests that Robert Mueller may have intervened. “Diligent prosecutors, when they see a defendant doing something profoundly dangerous to their self-interest (including hiring lawyers who have conflicts), will raise it with the defendant and suggest they rethink it,” he explained. “I think it very possible that that happened here—Mueller is a scrupulous prosecutor and may have told Trump he had concerns about Trump’s own rights. If it did happen, it would strongly suggest that Mueller is formally thinking of Trump as a target of his investigation . . . A prosecutor would issue such a warning to a target, not to a witness.”