Trump shakes up legal team

Former Clinton lawyer replaces Cobb in sign of change in strategy

Washington — President Donald Trump’s growing desire for his lawyers to more forcefully counter the ongoing special counsel investigation drove yet another shake-up of his legal team on Wednesday, putting the White House on a war footing with federal prosecutors examining Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who repeatedly urged cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller III and assured the president such a strategy could shorten the investigation, announced he would leave his post at the end of the month.

In his place, Trump tapped Republican defense attorney Emmet Flood, who brings experience wrangling with investigators when he represented President Bill Clinton during House proceedings to impeach him.

Flood will soon work alongside a remade group of personal lawyers — including another hire expected in the coming weeks — as they devise a new strategy to deal with Mueller’s team, according to White House advisers.

The latest upheaval of the president’s legal team comes as Trump has adopted an increasingly hostile posture toward the special counsel, whose investigation has expanded into an examination of whether Trump obstructed justice by seeking to shut down the probe.

“This signals a new phase,” said one senior Trump adviser who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations. “We are looking at all the options now. Nothing’s off the table . . . . But the gloves may be coming off.”

Mueller has been seeking an interview with the president — warning Trump’s lawyers in March that he could subpoena him if Trump declines, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Trump, who often considers himself his own best counselor on politics and law, has increasingly complained in recent weeks that he needed to consider all options for fighting Mueller and not simply agree to an interview, according to people familiar with his views.

Cobb was a strong advocate that the president should sit down with the special counsel, repeatedly counseling cooperation as a way to get the probe wrapped up quickly.

But other members of the legal team share Trump’s view that they should take a more confrontational approach with the special counsel, including lawyer Jay Sekulow, who has urged the group to consider the pros and cons of fighting a subpoena, according to people familiar with his advice.

“Jay felt that he needed someone that was more aggressive,” former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is now serving as Trump’s lead personal attorney dealing with the special counsel, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

“That’s not a criticism of Ty, but it’s just about how we’re going to do this,” he added.

Sekulow declined to comment.

Cobb told The Post that he was “deeply grateful” to Trump “for the opportunity to serve my country.”

In a statement to CBS, he said that he does not “mind being regarded as a peacemaker.”

Cobb said that Trump wanted him to stay on but that he felt he had fulfilled his role in facilitating document production and interviews with the special counsel for White House staff.

“People will think this means we’re going to war, but I would not read that into this,” he added.

But Cobb’s exit capped a 48-hour period during which Trump dramatically ratcheted up his criticism of the Mueller probe and the Justice Department as running a “rigged system.”

“There was no Collusion (it is a Hoax) and there is no Obstruction of Justice (that is a setup & trap),” the president tweeted Wednesday.

He later waded into an escalating standoff between Justice Department officials and GOP lawmakers demanding the release of a sensitive document outlining the scope of Mueller’s investigation.

“At some point I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!” Trump tweeted.

The combative tenor was apparent even in the official statement Wednesday from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirming that Flood would replace Cobb, which referred to Mueller’s investigation as “the Russia witch hunt.”

Flood, a partner at Williams & Connolly who appears willing to take a more adversarial approach to the special counsel than Cobb, was recruited in large part by White House Counsel Donald McGahn, according to two people familiar with the process.

McGahn, who knows Flood through their legal careers and work on conservative causes, has praised him in conversations with Trump and senior White House aides, seeing Flood as someone who shared his instincts and his wariness of overly engaging with the special counsel investigation, the people said.