Donald Trump’s latest Russia lawyer finds new way to embarrass himself even worse than Trump’s other lawyers

| 3:07 pm EDT September 3, 2017
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Donald Trump has had a wee bit of a hard time finding good attorneys during the course of his Russia scandal. One of them had to hire an attorney of his own. One of them had to apologize after threatening to hunt down a random detractor at his home. But now Trump’s most recently hired Russia lawyer may have found a new way to top them all. During what otherwise appeared to be a routine exchange, he randomly accused a reporter of being on drugs.

The Trump attorney in question is named Ty Cobb. He’s the most recent addition to Trump’s Russia defense legal team, and by all accounts, he was supposed to be the one who would clean up the team’s unprofessional antics. Moreover, because Trump hired Cobb as White House Special Counsel instead of as a personal attorney, Cobb is technically speaking on behalf of the White House. So it was more than a little disconcerting to see him resort to simply writing “Are you on drugs?”

Ty Cobb said these words to Business Insider reporter Natasha Bertrand after she had simply sent him some questions about the Russia scandal via email (link). Plenty of people, including me, have used this phrase informally and facetiously at one time or another to question the validity of someone’s behavior. But it’s best not to say that kind of thing on-the-record to a reporter, particularly when you’re an attorney representing the person occupying the office of President of the United States, because it will get printed.

As I’ve documented in the past, Business Insider has its problems. There are reporters on its staff willing to manufacture stories that they know are an inaccurate representation of what really happened. But I’ve never seen any evidence of Bertrand doing this herself, so she gets the benefit of the doubt here. And so Ty Cobb joins the ranks of Donald Trump’s Russia attorneys who inventively found ways to make their client look even worse than he already does.