With lawyers like these

The president’s defense team is awful

The president had better legal representation when Michael Cohen was still his attorney. That is no joke. Cohen, the president’s former “fixer,” pleaded guilty Tuesday to tax evasion and breaking campaign finance law. The same day, a jury convicted Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, of tax evasion and bank fraud.

Neither of their lawyers spent 30 hours telling the prosecution their legal strategy.

I need to explain because last Saturday seems so long ago. That was when the New York Times revealed White House counsel Don McGahn has spent 30 hours total talking to the special counsel investigating the president. The special counsel is the same one whose investigation cornered Manafort and Cohen.

To be precise, special counsel Robert Mueller handed off the investigation of Cohen to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. But the special counsel is due some sort of finder’s fee.

McGahn did not betray the president. Oh no. He cooperated with Mueller over his own objections and at the insistence of the president. The president’s private legal team — which has changed its lineup since and not for the better — wanted this. Cooperate with Mueller and get the investigation over with, they said sometime last year.

Now the wisdom of that is open to question, but that was not their worst mistake.

Once they kicked McGahn out of the gate, neither the president nor his legal eagles kept track of him. They found out McGahn spent what amounts to almost four full working days talking to the special counsel’s team when they read about it in the Times. I lack the nerve and the imagination to make this up.

Allow me to rant a bit about how unbelievable this is. I simply cannot imagine Bernard Nussbaum, the Clinton administration’s first White House counsel, giving 30 hours of testimony to a special counsel investigating his president. Nussbaum would have resigned first. In fact, he did after being overruled in his strident objection to allowing an independent counsel in the Whitewater matter at all.

“It was the worst presidential decision I ever made, wrong on the facts, wrong on the law, wrong on the politics, wrong for the presidency, and the Constitution,” President Clinton wrote in his memoirs about his decision to reject Nussbaum’s advice.

Now the current president is in a fine mess. It is one thing to claim you are somehow trapped into perjuring yourself if your statements conflict with, for instance, something James Comey said. Comey, of course, is the FBI director the president fired. It is something else entirely to claim a trap if your statements conflict with something your own White House counsel said in four days worth of talking.

Then there is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s most famously motor-mouthed personal lawyer. Giuliani will be forever famous for saying on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.” That is only a capstone in a seemingly never-ending stream of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I am just a wiseguy from Arkansas. Even I saw this debacle coming. Giuliani was hired in April. My very next column after he came on board said: “Hiring Rudy Giuliani as a lawyer, for instance, is a mistake. Giuliani talks too much. Enemies can always see and hear Giuliani coming.”

I would brag about being right, but as the Chinese say: To hear the thunderclap is no sign of acute hearing.

Giuliani is the president’s greatest weakness personified. The president treats his legal self-preservation as a public relations problem. As long as he thinks he is winning the nightly new cycle, he thinks he is winning.

There is nothing wrong with hiring a performance artist as a lawyer — as long as the attorney never forgets one thing. The most important performance he or she will ever give will be for an audience of 12 who are sitting in a jury box. That is the potential audience to always keep in mind.

Granted, the president is a difficult legal client who is clearly disinclined to take anyone’s advice or to shut up. But no lawyer who properly impressed upon the president the legal danger signs of the past week would ever have a client say, on Thursday: “If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash, I think everybody would be very poor.”

Seriously? Back off or the economy gets it? Raise the possibility of impeachment yourself?

Someone get this guy a lawyer.