Trump's legal woes

Nearly a dozen lawyers now assist President Trump in contending with two federal investigations, one in Washington and one in New York, that could pose serious threats to his presidency and his businesses. But the expanding legal team is struggling to understand where the investigations could be headed and the extent of Mr. Trump’s legal exposure.

  NYT

Which fund do you think he's paying them from: his campaign finance coffers or the Trump Foundation? I'm guessing campaign coffers since the New York investigation is into the Trump Foundation, but you know, he's pretty stupid, and the lawyers we've heard about seem almost as lame.

The lawyers have only a limited sense of what many witnesses — including senior administration officials and the president’s business associates — have told investigators and what the Justice Department plans to do with any incriminating information it has about Mr. Trump, according to interviews with more than a dozen people close to the president.

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.

Another potential problem for Mr. Trump emerged Friday when his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to corruption charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

It is not publicly known what, if any, damaging information about the president Mr. Manafort can give prosecutors.

I'm sure we can make some stunningly correct guesses on some of it.

[W]hile Mr. Trump’s lawyers insist Mr. Mueller has nothing on their client about colluding with Russia, they are bracing for him to write a damaging report to Congress about whether the president obstructed justice.

Which is something he's STILL doing, and no one can seem to stop 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.

To be fair, they were told by Trump that he had nothing to do with any of it.

Mr. Trump’s expanded and reconstituted legal team is now dealing far more aggressively with Mr. Mueller. But only in recent weeks, when it was reported that the soon-to-depart White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, spent at least 30 hours with Mr. Mueller’s investigators, have Mr. Trump’s lawyers fully understood just how much of an advantage Mr. Mueller gained because of Mr. Dowd’s initial strategy.

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.

And that was stupid.

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. 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.

According to Bob Woodward's book, Dowd did try to take him through mock deposition, and that failed miserably. So really, what could you possibly get from Trump that you could trust going into a trial, other than that the man is a consummate liar?

Mr. Dowd, who had come out of retirement to help one of the president’s longtime personal lawyers, Marc E. Kasowitz, offered a quick solution to the president’s legal problems.

Mr. Dowd explained that he had a special bond with Mr. Mueller because they had both served in the Marine Corps, and that he thought he could get him to end the investigation in a matter of weeks. Mr. Dowd said that he thought that he might even get the Justice Department to declare that Mr. Trump was not under investigation.

All the president had to do, Mr. Dowd said, was cooperate with Mr. Mueller. Mr. Trump, often enticed by promises of speedy and simple fixes to complex problems, embraced Mr. Dowd’s thinking.

Two bumbling idiots up against Mueller. It was no contest.

Make that three:

And with Mr. Dowd in control, [Trump] brought in another longtime Washington lawyer, Ty Cobb, who helped move ahead with the strategy of cooperation with Mr. Mueller by turning over tens of thousands of White House documents.

Mr. Cobb also predicted a quick end to the investigation. “I’d be embarrassed if this is still haunting the White House by Thanksgiving and worse if it’s still haunting him by year end,” Mr. Cobb was quoted as saying.

[...]

Dowd’s personal relationship Mr. Mueller never developed, and he began clashing with the special counsel’s office over whether Mr. Trump would be interviewed. Mr. Dowd has since said that he believes Mr. Mueller “snookered” the Trump team into cooperating.

Dowd snookered himself.

In March, Mr. Dowd resigned, telling associates that he disagreed with the president’s desire to sit for an interview with Mr. Mueller — one form of cooperation he opposed — and leaving [Jay] Sekulow with the task of rebuilding the legal team from scratch, and without knowing many of the details of the case. Mr. Dowd left few notes or files about the case, which had to be recreated months after the fact.

We can comment on Dowd's incompetency all we want, but we have to remember that at the time, Trump tried unsuccessfully to get representation from highly qualified lawyers and firms. Nobody that could have handled things wisely would agree to work for him.

“President Trump has been ill served by a legal team that failed to negotiate access, debrief and prep witnesses, constrain information flow and manage expectations,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, an opinion shared by many friends of the president’s. “He finds himself in a legal mess today because of their incompetence.”

So Bannon didn't counsel him on those points at the time? Trump is in a legal mess today because of his own incompetence and criminal activity. He's got no one to blame but himself.

Mr. Dowd has told associates that he believed the president when he told him he had done nothing wrong, and that he had to cooperate because he would not have prevailed in court if he fought Mr. Mueller’s requests to interview witnesses or obtain documents. But he declined several requests to be interviewed about his legal strategy.

[...]

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s replacement for Mr. Dowd, acknowledged that given the benefit of hindsight, “I think I would have done it differently.”

Who knows what that idiot might have done? He doesn't, I feel certain.

But he added that Mr. Dowd’s efforts “put us in a good position to resist a subpoena because there is no ‘particularized need’ for the president’s testimony.”

Well, that's a laugh. If there's no need for the president's testimony it's because four of his former associates who were in on the collusion gig have flipped and are testifying for him, and on the obstruction of justice charges, he's already blabbed and tweeted the evidence against himself. (And still is doing.)

Because Mr. Trump and his advisers had concluded that the only real threat to him was impeachment, Mr. Giuliani was brought in to lead the effort to undermine Mr. Mueller’s credibility with the public, while the husband and wife legal team of Jane and Marty Raskin, former federal prosecutors based in Florida, was hired to deal directly with Mr. Mueller’s office. To deal with the investigation of Mr. Cohen in New York, Mr. Trump hired Joanna C. Hendon.

And with Mr. Flood brought on to replace Mr. Cobb, who had also departed, a new, more aggressive team had taken shape.

But if the policy of cooperation had ended, the turmoil among the lawyers had not.

Ten days after The Times reported that Mr. McGahn had cooperated extensively with Mr. Mueller, Mr. Trump tweeted that [White House counsel] McGahn would be leaving the White House in the fall. That came as a surprise to Mr. McGahn, who had not discussed his departure with Mr. Trump since earlier this year.

Since then, Mr. Trump has had discussions with Mr. Flood about replacing Mr. McGahn. But Mr. Flood is hesitant, in part because that could pull him away from one of the main reasons he initially joined the White House: to represent another president in impeachment proceedings.

And I suggest Trump let him do it.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.