Trump’s new lawyer has perfect résumé for job, colleagues say
WASHINGTON >> As Congress prepared to impeach former President Bill Clinton in 1998, the president’s lawyers had a question: How exactly would this little-used, high-stakes process work?
To find an answer, they turned to Emmet Flood, a serious, low-key lawyer on Clinton’s personal legal team, who dove deeply into Congress’ historical records to figure out exactly how an impeachment and trial of a president would unfold.
Flood’s legal colleagues said the unusual inside knowledge he learned working the Clinton case, combined with a career spent navigating complex legal matters that also involve tricky political calculations, have made him a natural choice to join President Donald Trump’s legal team.
The White House announced Tuesday that Flood will replace Ty Cobb in the White House Counsel’s Office, serving as a point person for the White House’s response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“Emmet’s a terrific lawyer — smart, savvy and ethical — and one who lived through a special counsel’s investigation of a president,” said George Conway, a lawyer who advised the legal team of Paula Jones, who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment during the Clinton investigation.
Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but spared conviction and removal from office by the Senate.
People who know Flood said he is a thorough, straight-arrow attorney who bears a deep skepticism of overreach by the
government and its prosecutors.
“He feels strongly that this whole investigation is essentially an attempt to undermine an election,” said a Flood confidante, one of a number of his colleagues who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the Russia investigation. “He doesn’t like the idea of an independent counsel.”
Flood, 61, brings to the White House an impeccable resume in the conservative legal community and a topnotch reputation among Republican and Democratic colleagues.
“He’s a very, very good lawyer,” said David Kendall, who has served as Bill and Hillary Clinton’s chief lawyer since the 1990s.
“He’s bright as can be,” said Richard Cullen, a former U.S. attorney and Republican Virginia attorney general who now represents Vice President Mike Pence in the Russia matter. “A lot of times, you get bright guys who are not practical. He’s both.”
Flood declined to comment.
After brief stints as a high school teacher and philosophy professor (he holds a PhD in philosophy), Flood graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for a conservative legal hero, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
He has spent most of his professional career at the white shoe Washington firm Williams & Connolly, where he served on Clinton’s legal team but also represented former Vice President Dick Cheney in a civil lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose identity was provided to the media by a Cheney aide.
But he left the firm for two years in 2007 so he could serve as special counsel to President George W. Bush, where he handled Bush’s response to investigations of his midterm firing of seven U.S. attorneys.