Conflicts halt 2 hires on Trump legal team

President disputes reports of Russia inquiry scaring off some top attorneys

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump will not be adding two new lawyers to the legal team defending him in the special counsel’s Russia investigation after all, one of the president’s attorneys said Sunday.

Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said in a statement that Washington lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing have conflicts that won’t allow them to represent the president in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Sekulow had announced diGenova’s appointment last week.

Trump is now left, at least temporarily, without a traditional criminal defense attorney as Mueller’s team appears to be entering a critical phase in its investigation.

The unraveling of the president’s legal team has left his advisers concerned. People familiar with the situation said the president has been counseled by friends that he needs to find a new lawyer to quarterback his team, and efforts are underway by people close to Trump to try to hire a new lawyer.

Trump’s legal effort is now led by Sekulow, a conservative attorney and radio host who has concentrated on constitutional issues, and assisted by Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer paid by taxpayers to represent the institu-

tion of the presidency rather than Trump personally. Cobb has occasionally drawn the president’s ire, people familiar with the team have said.

A number of white-collar attorneys in Washington said the president has been unable to attract top-flight talent as he looks to overhaul his legal team, with major firms fearful that an affiliation with Trump and the Russia case could affect their ability to attract other clients and hire new lawyers.

Sunday’s announcement came just hours after Trump used Twitter to push back against those reports, saying he was “very happy” with his current attorneys.

“Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case,” he wrote, adding: “Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted.”

The president insisted that reports of flux on his team were a “Fake News narrative.” Adding new lawyers, he said, would be costly because they would take months “to get up to speed (if for no other reason than they can bill more).”

Neither the president nor Sekulow specified the conflict regarding diGenova and Toensing, who are married to each other and are law partners, but their firm has represented other clients in the special counsel’s investigation, including former Trump campaign adviser Sam Clovis.

Sekulow said Trump was “disappointed” that diGenova and Toensing won’t be defending him in the special counsel investigation, but that “those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the President in other legal matters.”

“The President looks forward to working with them,” he added.

On Sunday, diGenova and Toensing released a joint statement, saying, “We thank the president for his confidence in us, and we look forward to working with him on other matters.” DiGenova, who provided the statement to The Associated Press, declined to answer additional questions about the nature of his and Toensing’s representation of the president.

The president met with diGenova and Toensing in recent days to discuss the possibility that they would join his legal team in the Mueller case. According to two people told of details about the meeting, the president did not believe he had personal chemistry with diGenova and Toensing.

But beyond that, Toensing is representing Mark Corallo, who was the spokesman for Trump’s legal team in 2017 before they parted ways. He resigned in the wake of a dispute over the president’s role in a misleading statement about his son, Donald Trump Jr., and campaign aides’ meeting with a Russian lawyer who offered “dirt” on 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Corallo has told investigators that he was concerned that a close aide to Trump, Hope Hicks, may have been planning to obstruct justice during the drafting of a statement about that meeting.

Hicks’ lawyer has strongly denied that suggestion, and White House aides said Corallo’s assertion had come up in discussions with the president as he weighed whether to go ahead with the hiring of diGenova and Toensing.

TEAM’S SHAKE-UP

DiGenova had been expected to usher in a new strategy for the president after Trump’s lead attorney, John Dowd, resigned last week. Dowd had touted the cooperation of the White House and Trump campaign with Mueller. DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney, has been a fierce defender of Trump on television and accused the FBI of trying to “frame” the president for nonexistent crimes.

Dowd was the primary negotiator and legal strategist who had been putting together the president’s legal defense in the Russia probe led by Mueller. The legal team shake-up also comes as Trump’s attorneys have been negotiating with Mueller over the scope and terms of an interview with the president. Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether there was any collusion with the Trump campaign.

While Trump’s lawyers, including Dowd, had told the president that the investigation would be over by this point, it seems to be accelerating, as Mueller appears to be looking into a wide range of matters related to Trump’s corporate activities, his 2016 campaign, his associates and his time in office.

The special counsel’s team is also examining whether Trump obstructed justice by seeking to shut down the investigation, which was being conducted by the FBI until Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May of last year. Mueller was then appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The president tweeted Sunday, “there was NO COLLUSION with Russia,” pointing instead to Clinton.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the Russians hacked into the election and that every one of the president’s top security advisers has said they’ll be back. But he said the White House is providing no direction on making election security a top priority.

Warner was asked if the president is acting like he has been “compromised” when it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin. On a call with Putin, Trump congratulated him on his re-election last week but didn’t bring up the U.S. election meddling or the poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.

“It’s more than bizarre that 14 months into this president’s administration, he has failed to ever call out Russia. He has failed to ever condemn Putin,” said Warner, the leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“There is something just strange about this, and I think it’s one of the reasons why Mueller’s investigation has to continue and why our investigation has to continue.”

Information for this article was contributed by Ken Thomas, Chad Day and Kevin Freking of The Associated Press; by Maggie Haberman, Michael S. Schmidt and Mark Landler of The New York Times; and by Josh Dawsey, Carol D. Leonnig, Rosalind S. Helderman, John Wagner, Jenna Johnson and Breanne Deppisch of The Washington Post.