As Mueller’s probe expands, the president’s legal team is treading carefully.
.. Back in June,
Donald Trump was still treating the Russia investigation like some sort of defamation suit, one of a
countless number of lawsuits that Trump has been involved in over the years. The first attorney he retained to lead his legal team,
Marc Kasowitz, was his longtime personal lawyer from his New York real-estate days, and he responded as if former F.B.I. director
James Comey’s sworn Senate testimony was just another meritless claim he could dismiss with a cease-and-desist letter. “Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information . . . appears to be entirely retaliatory,” Kasowitz said in a statement at the time, reflexively going on the offensive. “We will leave it [to] the appropriate authorities to determine whether this leaks [sic] should be investigated along with all those others being investigated.”
.. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury, and Jay Sekulow, who occupies the role of Trump’s “TV lawyer,” defending the president on news shows, has apparently tempered his rhetoric.
.. Despite their best efforts, they’re dealing with a client who is almost pathologically incapable of telling the same story twice. When he fired Comey, Trump made his situation worse by offering a constantly evolving set of justifications for his dismissal.
.. A similar problem arose when Sekulow went from claiming that Trump played no role in crafting Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about his infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower last year, to the White House claiming that Trump helped “as any father would.”