Donald Trump’s lawyers begin scapegoating each other
Now that John Dowd and Ty Cobb have resigned, who’s left on Donald Trump’s legal team? Rudy Giuliani keeps reminding us that he’s on the team. Emmet Flood hasn’t said a word since he’s been hired. Jay Sekulow has been there the longest, but he doesn’t appear to be particularly involved these days. With a smaller team, there should at least be less infighting, right? Wrong. In fact the backbiting has gotten bad enough that it’s now spilling over into public view.
The trouble centers around the newly leaked “confidential memo” that Donald Trump and his legal team sent to Special Counsel Robert Mueller back in January, which finally surfaced in the media yesterday. In that memo, Trump and his lawyers admitted that Trump did in fact dictate his son Donald Trump Jr’s dishonest initial response to his Trump Tower meeting with the Russians. They then went on to argue that doing so was legal, because a sitting president can’t obstruct justice.
Sekulow signed off on that memo, but then he went on to publicly claim in interviews that Donald Trump did not dictate the response. That makes him a liability, and Rudy Giuliani seems to have decided that Sekulow needs to go. Rudy went on ABC News this weekend and announced “I think Jay was wrong.”
Then Giuliani went on to semi-coherently backtrack, which we’ll include here in full, so you can try to find any possible context for yourself: “this is the reason you don’t let the President testify. If, you know, every, our recollection keeps changing, or we’re not even asked a question, and somebody makes an assumption, in my case, I made an assumption and then I, then, then we corrected, and I got it right out as soon as, as soon as, as soon as it happened. I think that’s what happened here.”
The bottom line is this: Jay Sekulow is the only current member of Donald Trump’s legal team who was involved in the ill-fated memo, and he’s the one who went on television and contradicted the memo. Now Rudy Giuliani is publicly calling him out for it. Are we about to see yet another Trump defense attorney head for the exit?
