Any consideration of unemployment numbers under Donald Trump should be tempered by consideration of the massive growth in White House attorneys. Not only has every member of Trump’s staff, campaign team, and transition team grown a legal cadre, in many cases even the attorneys have attorneys. Trump’s own team has thrashed through vast numbers of variously coiffed and mustachioed legal giants as attorneys who come into his circle find that now—right now—would be a good time to announce their retirement. Or indictment. But even as Trump’s team of lawyers turns over (and over), it’s also growing. And the latest generation of Trump attorneys share a problem in common with many in the past: How do you defend a guy who will not tell his own attorneys the truth?
As the New York Times reports, Trump currently has two teams looking in different directions. One is in Washington, DC, to deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the slowly closing vise of the Russia investigation. The other team is back in New York City, where not only is State Attorney General Barbara Underwood is slogging through the ruins of Trump’s fake charity, but federal prosecutors are chasing down tax fraud and potential campaign finance violations. In both cities the nature of the problem for the attorneys is the same. They don’t know what what witnesses have told investigators, and they can’t plan for what’s coming next, because Donald Trump won’t be honest with them about the underlying issues and his own actions.
What is more, it is not clear if Mr. Trump has given his lawyers a full account of some key events in which he has been involved as president or during his decades running the Trump Organization.
There is one Trump attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who is a Trump confidante. Giuliani clearly knows where some of the bodies are buried, because he keeps turning up on national television with a spade and a map. But it’s not even clear that the rest of Trump’s legal team knows about the semi-daily Giuliani bombshells before they’re dropped.
And it’s not even clear how straight Trump is being with Giuliani. The whole legal team, Giuliani included, spent much of last week insisting that there was no concern about Paul Manafort “flipping” on Trump, because the former campaign chair had no information to offer. Then Manafort signed an open-ended cooperation agreement with the special counsel’s’s team and received a nice fat reduction in his charges and sentencing proposal that reflects really, really knowing something.
The inequality of the situation, with Robert Mueller talking to enough Trump associates who agreed to sing that he could stage a fair rendition of A Chorus Line, while Trump’s own attorneys are left with nothing but Trump’s insistence that there’s nothing, isn’t lost on that legal team. Whether it’s John Dowd, Ty Cobb, or soon to depart “I don’t really work for Trump” White House Counsel Don McGahn, most of Trump’s attorney’s have come to see that getting out of the way of this train wreck is their best chance to survive.
The revelation that McGahn was himself providing lengthy interviews with Mueller’s office brought home to the rest of Team Trump that even though their boss might ultimately decide to shutter the whole league, for the moment the playing field is anything but level. It’s not just that Trump keeps them shut away from the facts they need to do their job, it’s that defending Trump on the facts is not how he sees their job. Trump wants his attorneys to behave as he wants everyone else to behave, as mindless advocates using what little creativity they’re allowed to savage his enemies.
This is a legal fight where both Trump, Giuliani and even Robert Mueller seem to be in agreement: There is no legal fight.
Based on a generous interpretation of DOJ guidelines and a Trump-friendly (and possibly friendlier) Supreme Court, Trump feels safe from any threat of indictment. Impeachment is the only issue. And impeachment is a knife fight over public opinion. Trump intends to come into that fight with guns, bombs, and nuclear weapons. He’s using the power of his office in an attempt to eviscerate the FBI. He’s using his bully pulpit to daily demean and devalue the Department of Justice. He’s targeting Bruce Ohr, just as he previously targeted Andrew McCabe, specifically because Ohr is an expert on the kind of international money-laundering that put Trump back on his feet after his most recent bankruptcy.
The newest members of Trump’s legal team seem to understand their writ. As the Times reports, they are “now dealing far more aggressively with Mr. Mueller.” They understand enough of their position to understand that running the FBI and DOJ into the ground is central to their task. But what Trump isn’t providing to his team is enough truth about what he’s done and who knows it to ward off the hammer blows that come each time Mueller issues a string of indictments or pulls in a fresh cooperating witness.
Trump’s refusal to play it straight with his own legal team is coming back to bite Trump in the ass in some pretty amusing ways.
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 Mr. Trump’s lawyers first learning what the witnesses 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.
Trump told Dowd he’d done nothing wrong and … Dowd took him at his word. None of the current team will make that mistake. Since that first round, Trump’s attorneys have spent “at least 20 hours” in interviews with Trump covering the same “nothing” so they can at least try to back-calculate some of the damage already done.
Even in the best of circumstances, the battle between defense and prosecution isn’t even. There are well-nigh infinite resources available to Robert Mueller to track down leads, examine cracks in alibis, and look for connections. Even so, Trump is making the job for his team massively harder by refusing to tell them what he’s done and what he knows.
But of course, Trump may have trouble opening up to attorneys. After all, look how that worked out last time.
The former lawyer/fixer for Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, is reportedly discussing a potential plea deal with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to NBC News.