Donald Trump’s newly hired lawyer just quit
Anthony Scaramucci is officially off the hook. He was fired just eleven days after being announced as Donald Trump’s new White House Communications Director, making for a comically short tenure. Even as Trump has rapidly gone through other staffers like water, their own fairly brief tenures have jokingly been measured in “Scaramuccis.” But now another Trump hire has just wrested the title away for the most ludicrously brief amount of time on the job.
On Monday, Trump’s people announced that attorney Joe diGenova was being hired for the Trump-Russia legal team. Best anyone can tell, Trump liked diGenova’s performance on Fox News and decided to hire him on the spot. The trouble: Trump had never even spoken with diGenova, and once they finally did meet, competing leaks to the media alternately claimed that Trump wasn’t sure he’d hired the right guy, and that diGenova wasn’t sure he’d taken on the right client.
By midweek the focus was on the elephant in the room: diGenova’s wife and law partner Victoria Toensing was already representing Mark Corallo, Trump’s former legal spokesman who recently became a cooperating witness for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Attorneys aren’t allowed to be involved in that kind of conflict of interest, and so even if the whole thing hadn’t already been falling apart of its own accord, there was no way diGenova could represent Trump.
Sure enough, this morning Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he’s not hiring any new attorneys for his Trump-Russia legal team after all. This was his way of firing Joe diGenova without mentioning his name – that is, of course, if diGenova even technically had the job to begin with. In other words, Trump’s newly hired attorney lasted somewhere between zero and six days on the job before being dismissed via tweet. It was tricky enough to calculate “Scaramuccis” by dividing by eleven. Now when calculating “diGenovas” we’re looking at the possibility of dividing by zero. That’s not even technically possible – but neither is this presidency.
