The NY Times Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt try to fill in the story of how badly Trump’s legal defense has been managed, with his lawyers doing their best to defend a client who clearly is incapable of cooperating even with his own legal team. Bob Woodward’s description of the competence of the Trump WH led by a “fucking liar”, seems even more accurate.
The sense of unease among the president’s lawyers can be traced, in part, to their client. Mr. Trump has repeatedly undermined his position by posting on Twitter or taking other actions that could add to the obstruction case against him. But those close to the president also blame the strategy pursued by the first head of his legal team, John Dowd, to cooperate fully with Mr. Mueller while negotiating few concessions.
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Mr. Dowd took Mr. Trump at his word that he had done nothing wrong and never conducted a full internal investigation to determine the president’s true legal exposure. During Mr. Dowd’s tenure, prosecutors interviewed at least 10 senior administration officials without first learning what they planned to say, or debriefing their lawyers afterward — a basic step that could have given the president’s lawyers a view into what Mr. Mueller had learned. And once Mr. Dowd was gone, the new legal team had to spend at least 20 hours interviewing the president about the episodes under investigation, another necessary step Mr. Dowd and his associates had apparently not completed.
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Even after Mr. Mueller’s appointment, Mr. Trump did things like ask witnesses about what they told Mr. Mueller’s investigators and put out misleading statements about contacts between his campaign and Russia, which appear to have deepened the special counsel’s examination of possible obstruction.
www.nytimes.com/…