The president has proven unable to weasel his way out of the Russia investigation, even though he’s continuously tried desperately to do so. To that apparent end, he went so far as to fire the FBI Director last year, prompting — thanks to that and other questionable actions taken on his part — allegations of obstruction of justice.
Now, as he continues to struggle under the weight of the investigation, the president has lost his lead lawyer, according to The New York Times. The paper reports that John Dowd, who has been in the news recently for his comments about the Russia scandal, has resigned.
One of the sources who revealed as much to the publication said that Dowd had prior to his resignation “concluded that Mr. Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice.”
Whether or not the president should have taken Dowd’s advice is a different story. Dowd is reported by The Times to have “believed it was a bad idea” for the president to sit for an interview with Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller’s team. The president, on the other hand, in a feat of cooperation made remarkable by the repeated instances of him seeking to undercut the investigation, has made it clear that he’s open to sitting down with Mueller.
Even still, that one instance of the president proving open to cooperation does not do away with the many other instances in which he has sought to undercut Mueller’s inquiry.
Recently, Dowd proved to be at least mostly on the president’s side when it came to the overall question of the legitimacy of Mueller’s investigation.
Last Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, accusing him of misleading internal DOJ investigators about his role in having FBI agents speak to the media about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
McCabe insists he’s done nothing wrong, but in the wake of his firing, Dowd took his departure as a triumph, saying that he hoped Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took a cue from Sessions’ willingness to fire McCabe and fired Mueller.
Although he initially claimed to be speaking on the president’s behalf, he walked that back.
The president, for his part, offered his own praise of McCabe’s firing, which he coupled with his own attacks on Mueller’s investigation.
He called McCabe’s firing a “great day for Democracy” in a statement posted to Twitter.
Again seeming to indicate that the president somehow managed to bring on a lawyer with worse legal tendencies than his own, Dowd claimed at one point to have been behind a tweet the president posted that incriminated him on the aforementioned obstruction of justice allegations.
The tweet indicated the president knew Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI before firing him, making his eventual alleged pressure on then-FBI Director James Comey to end the federal government’s investigation of Flynn that much more corrupt.
After backlash, Dowd claimed to have been the one behind the tweet.
The Times notes that who exactly will take over the position of lead lawyer on the president’s legal team is not immediately clear. Other lawyers working for the president include Ty Cobb, Jay Sekulow, and the recently added Joseph diGenova.
Featured Image via Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images
