President Trump’s shift in tone appears to be a product of his concern that the investigation into possible ties between his associates and Russia’s election interference is bearing down on him more directly. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — President Trump’s legal team was poised for a shake-up on Monday, according to two people briefed on the matter, as he openly discussed firing one of his lawyers, another considered resigning and a third — who pushed theories on television that Mr. Trump was framed by the F.B.I. — joined the roster.
Mr. Trump has weighed aloud in recent days to close associates whether to dismiss his lawyer Ty Cobb, who had pushed most strongly a strategy of cooperating fully with the special counsel investigation. The president reassured Mr. Cobb that he had no plans to fire him, according to a person who spoke with the president late Monday, in part to prevent a narrative that his team was in disarray after The New York Times began making inquiries.
Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer, John Dowd, has contemplated leaving his post because he has concluded that he has no control over the behavior of the president, the two people briefed on the matter said. Ignoring his lawyers’ advice, Mr. Trump has reverted to a more aggressive strategy of publicly assailing the inquiry that he initially adopted in the weeks immediately after the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was appointed. Now the president has begun attacking Mr. Mueller himself.
The shift in tone appears to be a product of the president’s concern that the investigation into possible ties between his associates and Russia’s election interference is bearing down on him more directly. And the legal team’s collapse comes as his lawyers are confronting one of their most critical tasks: advising the president on whether to agree to sit for an interview with the special counsel’s office.
Mr. Dowd said he had no plans to leave the team. “I’m sitting here working on the president’s case right now,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday night. Mr. Cobb has told people that the president has recently implored him to stay.
In another sign of the president’s more aggressive posture, on Monday he hired Joseph E. diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer who has appeared regularly on Fox News in recent months to claim that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had manufactured evidence against Mr. Trump to aid Hillary Clinton.
“There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” he said on Fox News in January. He added, “Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”
Little evidence has emerged to support that theory.
Mr. Trump is also discussing adding other lawyers to the team, according to one person with knowledge of the matter.
The tumult marked the greatest instability on the team since Mr. Trump pushed aside his personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, last summer, and was passed over by many of Washington’s top lawyers before he settled on his current crop of attorneys.
“It’s never a good idea to see legal teams change dramatically and for competent lawyers to be replaced by others,” said Roger Cossack, a longtime legal analyst. “It shows that there is chaos and that whoever the client is — in this case the president — is unhappy and is searching for the magic bullet. And it’s never a great strategy to search for the magic bullet. The president clearly wants it to end and wants to put an end to it.”
Mr. Cobb, Mr. Dowd and another lawyer, Jay Sekulow, took over last summer from Mr. Kasowitz, a feisty New Yorker who had represented Mr. Trump in high-profile lawsuits and urged an aggressive posture toward Mr. Mueller, who was appointed last May.
Mr. Trump insisted to his lawyers that he did nothing wrong and they pushed for cooperation with the special counsel, arguing it was his best way to have his name cleared. Working inside the White House, Mr. Cobb oversaw the production of thousands of pages of documents and emails that were turned over to Mr. Mueller’s office and said that the president should not assert executive privilege over the records to keep from slowing the process. The lawyers told the president they hoped to get Mr. Mueller to acknowledge by the end of the year that Mr. Trump was not a target of the investigation.
Mr. Mueller’s investigation is continuing.
As it goes forward, Mr. Trump has questioned his lawyers’ approach and clashed with them about whether to be interviewed by Mr. Mueller. The president believes he is his best spokesman and can explain to Mr. Mueller that he did nothing wrong. The lawyers see little upside.
Mr. Dowd and Mr. Sekulow became concerned about their standing with the president in the past two weeks after they learned Mr. Trump had met with another veteran lawyer, Emmet Flood, who represented President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings, about joining the team.
Both publicly and privately, Mr. Trump tried to reassure his lawyers that they had not fallen out of favor with him. “I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow,” Mr. Trump
said on Twitter, assailing
a New York Times article about his discussions with Mr. Flood. “They are doing a great job.”
Mr. Dowd, in turn, called on the Justice Department over the weekend to end the special counsel investigation. Mr. Dowd said at first that he was speaking for the president, but later backtracked. But according to two people briefed on the matter, he was in fact acting at the president’s urging.
Mr. Dowd’s statement set off a stream of negative coverage of Mr. Trump on cable television, to which he is closely attuned. His lawyers were criticized for being undisciplined, and Mr. Dowd’s remarks
prompted concern that the president was going to order that Mr. Mueller be fired. Mr. Cobb tried to douse that speculation on Sunday, saying that the president was not considering dismissing the special counsel.
The president’s newest lawyer, Mr. diGenova, has worked in Washington legal circles for decades, including as a United States attorney for the District of Columbia appointed by President Ronald Reagan. He has served as an independent counsel in government waste, fraud and abuse investigations, notably a three-year criminal inquiry into whether officials in the George Bush administration broke any laws in their search for damaging information about Bill Clinton, then a presidential candidate.
Mr. diGenova is law partners with his wife, Victoria Toensing. She has also represented Sam Clovis, the former Trump campaign co-chairman, and Erik Prince, the founder of the security contractor Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump. Mr. Prince also attended a meeting in January 2017 with a Russian investor in the Seychelles that the special counsel is investigating.
Ms. Toensing also represents Mark Corallo, the former spokesman for the Trump legal team who has accused one of the president’s advisers of potentially planning to obstruct justice with a statement related to a 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. diGenova was one of several former independent counsels who, in the late 1990s, argued that the role be narrowed. In 1999, Congress let the portions of the law allowing for an independent counsel expire.
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Michael S. Schmidt reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from
Manchester, N.H. Matt Apuzzo and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting
from Washington.
