President’s legal team is growing, operating in dark
WASHINGTON — Nearly a dozen lawyers now assist President Donald 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 Trump’s legal exposure.
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 Trump, according to interviews with more than a dozen people close to the president.
What is more, it is not clear if 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 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 Manafort can give prosecutors — Trump’s lawyers insist he has none — but his cooperation brings a new level of uncertainty. Manafort spent considerable time with Trump and his family during the 2016 presidential campaign, including attending a meeting with Russians offering negative information on Hillary Clinton, and has had extensive business dealings with Russians close to the Kremlin.
His plea brings to four the number of former close associates of Trump who have agreed to cooperate with Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election and obstruction of justice by the president. And while Trump’s lawyers insist 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.
The sense of unease among the president’s lawyers can be traced, in part, to their client. Trump has repeatedly undermined his position by posting on Twitter or taking other actions that could add to the obstruction case against 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 Mueller while negotiating few concessions.
By early this year, the president had concluded that the strategy Dowd promised would help bring the Mueller investigation to a quick conclusion had failed and shortly afterward he was gone.
Trump’s expanded and reconstituted legal team is now dealing far more aggressively with Mueller. But only in recent weeks, when it was reported that the soon-to-depart White House counsel, Don McGahn, spent at least 30 hours with Mueller’s investigators, have Trump’s lawyers fully understood just how much of an advantage Mueller gained because of Dowd’s initial strategy.
Dowd took 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 Dowd’s tenure, prosecutors interviewed at least 10 senior administration officials without 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 Mueller had learned. And once 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 Dowd and his associates had apparently not completed.
“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 Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, an opinion shared by many friends of the president. “He finds himself in a legal mess today because of their incompetence.”
New questions about the president’s first legal team arose after journalist Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, was published this month. The book said that Dowd believed that Trump was a liar who was not capable of answering questions from Mueller. And in a meeting with prosecutors, Dowd said nearly as much, Woodward reported, telling Mueller that the president would most likely provide a false statement in an interview.