Trump lawyer urging restraint on Mueller is odd man out

The addition of Joseph diGenova to the president's legal team marks a turn toward the combative stance taken by attorney John Dowd.

President Donald Trump loves a killer, and he just added one more to his legal team with Joseph diGenova.

But the hiring of another veteran Washington scandal attorney who views special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as illegitimate is hardly good news for Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who’s now left more isolated than ever in his pleas for cooperation with the Russia probe.

Trump’s legal team has been sending mixed messages for months about Mueller, with Cobb arguing that a go-along, get-along approach has the best chance of bringing about a rapid conclusion to the Russia investigation. That’s a sharp contrast with John Dowd, the president’s personal lawyer, who has urged Trump to resist a sit-down interview with the special counsel and made his biggest splash yet this past weekend by calling for the whole investigation to be shuttered.

The president’s lawyers aren’t just fighting among themselves. Their disagreement reflects Trump’s own divided views about how to handle a scandal that has overshadowed his first year in office. It’s also why the talk about Mueller being fired won’t go away — no matter how many statements Cobb issues from the White House saying that such a move is not being discussed and has never been under consideration.

The latest Trump lawyer dispute represents “a clearer manifestation of the two-track process that has been going on for some time: Pledge cooperation, and presumably give cooperation, by providing requested documents and making people available for interviews, while letting your surrogates attack Mueller & Company in hopes of ultimately closing down the probe,” said former Whitewater deputy counsel Sol Wisenberg.

Trump’s legal team is bigger than just Dowd and Cobb. At the White House, Cobb has been leaning on as many as five aides, including Steven Groves, who stepped down last August from his job as chief of staff to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

There’s also Jay Sekulow, who has frequently used his live weekday talk-radio show to criticize the Russia investigation while also spearheading the president’s legal defense research on some of the constitutional questions at the center of Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation. Sekulow also contributes the work of four attorneys with ties to the nonprofit he runs, the American Center for Law and Justice.

Trump has also sought advice on the Russia scandal from his longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz, a New York- based attorney who originally led the president’s response but stepped down last summer, and Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro, who Trump has also known for decades. Others who know the president say they try to get their legal advice to the president through the cable shows they know he watches.

“If he can watch TV, he knows how I feel,” Roger Stone, the GOP operative and longtime Trump political adviser, said in a recent interview.

Despite all the legal advice coming his way, a person familiar with Trump’s legal strategy said the president’s natural inclinations of swinging hard are starting to show — even as his lawyers continue to fight among themselves.

“There is no strategy in place here,” this person said. “This is the president, period. It is the president looking at his history of dealing with tight situations and public fights and how he feels most comfortably fighting those fights. This guy likes fights. And he trusts his own instincts. He trusts it above the instincts of his own lawyers. He trusts it above the instincts of his own communications team, whether inside or outside the White House.”

Trump’s attack-dog approach to the Mueller probe will get another potent voice with diGenova, a former federal prosecutor who once served as an independent counsel to investigate whether aides to President George H.W. Bush violated federal law by searching Bill Clinton’s passport files during the 1992 presidential campaign. He is slated to start later this week but has been channeling his inner Trump for months, calling former FBI Director James Comey a “dirty cop,” blasting Mueller’s ethics and arguing that the Russia probe had dubious origins.

“There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” diGenova said during a Fox News appearance in January. He added: “Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”

The person familiar with Trump’s legal strategy said the addition of diGenova is a bad omen for Cobb, who was sent out on cleanup duty late Sunday with a one-sentence statement insisting a weekend’s worth of anti-Mueller comments from the president and Dowd should not be interpreted as signals that the special counsel’s job was in jeopardy.

“I don’t think he’s long for this team. It’s clear the president wants to be more aggressive,” this person said.

Indeed, about 12 hours after Cobb’s remark that the president “is not considering or discussing the firing” of Mueller, Trump took to Twitter with a Monday morning post suggesting the special counsel faced ethical challenges that merited closer examination.

“A total WITCH HUNT with massive conflicts of interest!” Trump wrote, echoing complaints he made in private last June to White House counsel Don McGahn in an order to fire Mueller.

McGahn ignored the president’s request, told senior colleagues he’d resign over it, and then shared details with the special counsel about the interaction when he was interviewed last December.

Cobb’s fate has been up in the air for months. Some Trump boosters were arguing late last year that Cobb should be fired because he’d set up unrealistic expectations about when the Russia investigation will end.

But Cobb remains on the White House payroll, even though his workload has dwindled since last fall. That’s the byproduct of the Russia probe moving away from the document production he was in charge of and in assisting Mueller in arranging a spate of initial interviews with current and former White House aides, including McGahn and outgoing communications director Hope Hicks.

A defense lawyer working on the Russia case said Cobb had recently been marginalized by the other Trump attorneys working on the case.