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Trump attorney frantically tries to undo weekend of obstructing justice

Trump keeps advertising his guilt, and his lawyers can’t walk that back.

By Eric Boehlert - March 19, 2018
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Donald Trump

Arriving on the scene of a White House accident 24 hours late, Trump attorney Ty Cobb tried hopelessly to undo the damage his client had wrought with a weekend of guilty tweeting.

In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the Administration, the White House yet again confirms that the President is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller,” Cobb announced.

Of course, the so-called “media speculation” that Cobb was trying to knock down had come directly from another one of Trump’s own attorneys and then amplified by Trump himself.

It’s just the latest chapter from a dysfunctional White House that careens out of control on an hourly basis.

After the abrupt firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe late Friday, John Dowd, who serves as Trump’s personal defense lawyer, told The Daily Beast on Saturday that he thinks Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should shut down the special counsel’s investigation. When he made the remarks, Dowd said he was speaking in his capacity as Trump’s lawyer.

Hours later, Dowd appeared to realize his slip-up and tried to walk back his remarks, saying that he was acting in his personal capacity and not as Trump’s lawyer.

Meanwhile, Trump completely unraveled on Twitter, insisting, “The Mueller probe should never have been started.” And he repeated the thoroughly debunked lie that “there was no collusion.”

It was the first time Trump had attacked Mueller by name. And it came soon after reports surfaced that Mueller’s investigation had demanded documents from the Trump Organization, signaling that Trump’s business past practices were now under legal scrutiny.

In fact, Trump basically spent the entire weekend advertising his guilty conscious via Twitter, until his aides finally whisked him off to a golf course, apparently in hopes of calming him down. Or at least to get him to stop tweeting out his panic attacks.

Then on Sunday night, Cobb arrived on the scene one day late in an attempt to clean up the disarray.

But it was way too late. Dowd’s demand that Mueller be fired only confirmed everybody’s suspicions — that Trump views the firing of McCabe as a way to bring the Russia investigation to an end.

In a way, Trump’s attorneys are tasked with a hopeless assignment, which is trying to clean up the very public spills Trump creates.

He now seems determined to act as his own legal counsel, chief of staff, and press secretary. He reportedly no longer has any hesitation blurting out whatever harebrained thought pops into his head, even if those thoughts are about an unfolding special counsel investigation, of which he is clearly the target.

“Special counsel Robert Mueller has focused on events since the election — not during the campaign — in his conversations with President Trump’s lawyers,” Axios reported Monday. “The top two topics that Mueller has expressed interest in so far: the firings of FBI director James Comey and national security adviser Michael Flynn.”

Stuck with an erratic, guilty client, Trump’s attorneys are reduced to doing their best Keystone Kops impression in public.


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