RSN Fundraising Banner
FB Share
Email This Page
add comment
Print

Tracy writes: "Legal experts say there should be at least 15 to 20 investigators working on Trump's defense. Instead, the president's team is desperately understaffed and seemingly unprepared to face the special counsel."

Robert Mueller. (photo: James Berglie/TNS)
Robert Mueller. (photo: James Berglie/TNS)


Why Trump Is Unready to Face Mueller

By Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair

21 September 18


Legal experts say there should be at least 15 to 20 investigators working on Trump’s defense. Instead, the president’s team is desperately understaffed and seemingly unprepared to face the special counsel. “It seems though that there really isn’t an appreciation for the seriousness of the potential problem and the amount of coordination and work that has to be done,” says one attorney. “There are very significant legal and political threats to the president and those around him.”

he sexual assault accusation shadowing Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has consumed the White House this week, temporarily distracting from Donald Trump’s own hair-raising legal troubles. But the Mueller investigation, immune to the churn of another chaotic news cycle, continues apace. Last Friday, Washington was convulsed by the news that Paul Manafort had agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department probe and that Michael Cohen, as my colleague Emily Jane Fox reported, has also begun to talk. Days later, in a move that seemed anything but coincidental, the special counsel’s office filed court documents clearing the way for a judge to sentence Michael Flynn.

It is curious, then, that the White House isn’t acting troubled at all. “We’ve talked to their side,” Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told The Washington Post, shrugging off the fact that Manafort—Trump’s former campaign manager, who was present at an infamous 2016 meeting with a host of Kremlin intermediaries peddling dirt on Clinton, and who Trump had called “brave” for refusing to break—is now spilling his guts for a reduced sentence. “The statement is, there is nothing that is adverse to the president, the Trump family, the Trump campaign.”

For veterans of the D.C. bar, however, Mueller’s most recent victories don’t look like “nothing”—and they can’t help but rubberneck at the White House’s bewildering response. On the one hand, Giuliani’s primary goal appears to be winning a public-relations battle to tar the Justice Department and F.B.I. as corrupt. He has repeatedly referenced D.O.J. guidance that says a sitting president cannot be indicted, only impeached by Congress. At the same time, explained Ross Garber, a professor at Tulane Law School, Giuliani and his colleagues seem to be discounting the many other ways in which Mueller could upend Trump’s life. “Rudy has suggested that he sees impeachment as the only threat here, [but] I don’t think that is even close to being true,” Garber told me. “There are very significant legal and political threats to the president and those around him.” The Mueller probe, for instance, has already birthed multiple parallel investigations into Trump’s businesses and associates in New York, where the president’s pardon power is limited. And then there are the dozens of investigations Democrats are likely to launch if they retake the U.S. House of Representatives in November. “One of the biggest issues here is there is no one point [of legal vulnerability]. The president is now fighting battles on several fronts, and they will no doubt be more fronts opened up,” Garber added. “This isn’t anywhere close to being over.”

Making matters worse is the dilapidated state of Trump’s personal legal defense. The New York Times, citing interviews with more than a dozen individuals close to Trump, pinned much of the blame on Trump’s former attorney John Dowd:

Mr. Dowd took Mr. 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 Mr. Dowd’s tenure, prosecutors interviewed at least 10 senior administration officials without Mr. 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 Mr. Mueller had learned. And once Mr. 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 Mr. Dowd and his associates had apparently not completed.

Regardless of whether another lawyer would have fared better, it seems clear that Trump’s legal team is in trouble and operating largely in the dark. “The reality is that you have got to get to exactly what happened,” said Andrew Hall, who represented former Richard Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman during the Watergate scandal. “You don’t know what happened and then you don’t know what version is being told because like all other things, no two witnesses see the exact same event exactly the same way.” During the Watergate scandal, the best thing you could do is “you get in and you keep digging and digging and digging,” he explained. “You are never going to know what the prosecutors know or not but actually you want to know more than what they know. You want to find out what everybody has said about your client and where that fits in the big picture.”

Garber, who also serves as a criminal defense attorney, concurred. “It seems though that there really isn’t an appreciation for the seriousness of the potential problem and the amount of coordination and work that has to be done,” he said. “And ultimately it is the client who controls that. It is the client who controls who the lawyers are and how many there are and at the end of the day, how they work together—or how they don’t.”

Of course, collating the testimony of dozens of witnesses—all of whom may be fearful of their own legal exposure—is no easy task. “Every one of these witnesses need private, retained counsel—every single one,” Hall told me, noting that Dowd’s ability to communicate with witnesses would have been limited by tampering laws. “They are government employees, they need to have lawyers and those lawyers need to coordinate with other lawyers that are representing other witnesses,” he said. “You have to have each one of these witnesses basically feel safe that they have somebody only in their camp and that if they are about to do something harmful to the president, then the president’s lawyer needs to find it out but it can’t be tampering with evidence—there is a big difference. That’s what gets you into trouble, the tampering and the cover-up.”

That process has been made all the more difficult by the rapid turnover within Trump’s team. Dowd and Ty Cobb, who formerly represented the White House in the Russia probe, reportedly pushed for cooperation with Mueller, betting that he would be exonerated. Other members of Trumpworld strenuously disagreed: former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Times that Trump “finds himself in a legal mess today because of their incompetence.” Since then, Emmet Flood, a veteran of the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings, is said to have taken a less cooperative approach to Mueller and reportedly blocked Chief of Staff John Kelly from speaking with the special counsel.

The result, as Hall put it to me, has been a patchwork legal defense without any unifying theory of the case. “They seem to have a lot of agendas but no strategy so far has been forthcoming.” (Another Washington defense attorney disagreed, arguing that Mueller would likely have successfully subpoenaed all the information he needed anyway.)

The graver mistake, according to legal experts I spoke with, is that the Trump team underestimated the Mueller threat and failed to staff up in the face of it. “I have been surprised by the apparent small size of the legal team representing the White House and the president and other witnesses,” Garber told me. “In past investigations of the White House under other administrations, the legal teams were quite large and well-resourced and even in much less significant cases, you see legal teams with better resources. . . . This is a complicated investigation.” Hall echoed the sentiment, noting that beyond the personal lawyers for Trump and other witnesses, there should be a team of 15 to 20 investigators either working for Trump in a personal capacity or the Republican National Committee trying to glean as much information as Mueller.

If the Trump team has, in fact, failed to do a deep dive into what witnesses know and what they might spill to Mueller, it might be too late to make up lost ground. As Garber explained, getting information from witnesses “gets more complicated because typically people move from cooperating together to splintering off and some becoming cooperators for the government . . . at the point that somebody becomes a cooperator for the government, the flow of information back to folks that are not cooperating with the government generally ceases.”

Email This Page

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page

 

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

RSNRSN