Ty Cobb, President Donald Trump’s top White House lawyer responding to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, is out, according to the New York Times’s Matt Apuzzo and Michael Schmidt. He will likely be replaced by Emmet Flood, who worked for President Bill Clinton during his impeachment battle, though the Times report cautions that Flood’s hiring hasn’t yet been finalized.
Ty Cobb exits Trump’s legal team
Trump is losing yet another lawyer for the Mueller probe.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
The news is yet another tumultuous development for Trump’s legal team, just as it has been in the midst of negotiations with Mueller about a sit-down interview with the president. John Dowd, who was Trump’s top personal lawyer for the probe, resigned from the team in March, and Rudy Giuliani, Jane Raskin, and Martin Raskin joined the team in April.
It also comes after Trump has escalated his rhetoric criticizing Mueller and his probe — something Cobb pointedly resisted doing during his tenure, instead advising a strategy of cooperation and openness.
Trump insisted on Twitter in early March that he was “VERY happy with my lawyers” and had no plans to shake up the team. Since then, both Dowd and Cobb have exited, leaving only Jay Sekulow from that previous team.
Cobb is suggesting it was his choice to exit and that he told Trump weeks ago that he wanted to retire, according to the Times. We don’t yet know the full story of what’s been happening behind the scenes. But it’s safe to say that Trump is unhappy with how his legal representation in the Mueller probe has been going so far — and now Cobb has been shown the door.
Who is Ty Cobb?
Denver Post via Getty Images
Allegedly a relation of the famous baseball player of the same name, Cobb has had a decades-long legal career in white-collar criminal defense, eventually rising to partner at the firm Hogan Lovells.
Then, back during the last major period of tumult and turnover in Trump’s legal team, last summer, John Dowd replaced Marc Kasowitz as the president’s top personal lawyer responding to Robert Mueller’s investigation. Dowd then recommended Trump hire Ty Cobb to manage the White House’s legal response to the special counsel (taking it over from White House counsel Don McGahn).
So Cobb left his firm and joined the White House, taking on by far his highest-profile job ever. Back in July, he told a reporter that he took the gig because “I have rocks in my head and steel balls.”
Legally, Cobb was said to have counseled cooperation and friendly relations with Mueller’s team. He advocated in favor of openness and turning over many internal documents rather than withholding them by making claims of executive privilege. He repeatedly asserted that the president had nothing to hide and would soon be vindicated.
In September, Cobb made headlines by discussing his legal strategy with Dowd during lunch at a Washington, DC, steakhouse — within earshot of New York Times reporter Ken Vogel.
But Cobb was perhaps most famous for his repeated erroneous predictions that Mueller’s investigation would soon conclude. “By Thanksgiving,” he said in August. By the end of the year, he said in November. “Shortly after the first of the year,” he said in December. “In 4-6 weeks,” he said this January.
He was wrong every time. No end to the investigation is currently in sight.
See More:
