Trump’s Lawyers Need to Worry About More Than Winning
In a remarkable series of interviews, the president’s most public lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, put on a show of unconventional lawyering. He quoted Donald Trump on the extended history of his mid-campaign negotiations with Russia over a hotel project in Russia. He quickly backtracked and restated the startling disclosure as a “hypothetical.” He wouldn’t say what the president told him, he admonished a reporter; the communications were confidential, and “I’m his lawyer.”
But then Giuliani promptly related the president’s “recollections” on the subject. At another point, he seemed to suggest that whatever hope he had for a healthy legacy as a former prosecutor and mayor of New York City might be dashed by a late-life turn as a liar for Trump. And even his decisions about the interviews he would grant, and when, seem surpassingly haphazard. He recently took a call from The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, and gave an interview, on his way to the shower.
This is not the first time that the president’s lawyers’ unusual behaviors have turned heads. Giuliani was, and then found their comments reported in the paper. If this was strange, so was the tweet that one of the lawyers he sent out in the president’s name, on the reasons for his firing of FBI Director James Comey, which caused his client all sorts of trouble.
