Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump's lead lawyer, John Dowd, has resigned from the President's personal legal team handling the response to the Russia investigation.
"I love the President and wish him well," Dowd said in a statement to CNN.
Dowd, who has urged the President to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's probe and resist attacking him publicly, resigned as his disagreements with Trump intensified and the President stepped up his attacks on the special counsel. His departure raises questions about the direction of Trump's legal strategy and could signal a more aggressive posture on Trump's part.
Just days before his resignation, Dowd said in a statement the investigation should end, initially claiming he was speaking for the President before saying he was only speaking for himself. Two sources familiar with the matter said Trump had encouraged Dowd to speak out. But the statement only drew unwanted headlines and stoked turmoil within the President's legal team, according to multiple sources.
One source familiar with the decision described Dowd's resignation as a "mutual decision."
Despite public claims that he was happy with him, Trump complained privately in recent days that he thought Dowd was falling short of his duties, a source familiar with his thinking said. He questioned whether he had the energy or capacity to continue on in his role as the lead lawyer for the special counsel's investigation.
It was not immediately clear who would take over as the President's lead personal attorney, but Trump earlier this week hired another veteran Washington attorney, Joseph diGenova, to join his legal team. DiGenova was expected to play a forward-facing role on the legal team, filling what Trump felt was a lack of voices publicly defending him and challenging the special counsel.
DiGenova had publicly argued that Trump had been "framed" by FBI and Justice Department officials.
Dowd's departure also raises questions about the fate of negotiations between the President's attorneys and the special counsel's team over a potential interview with the President as Dowd has been the main point of contact with the special counsel's team throughout the investigation. One source said there is concern about the void Dowd will leave in his wake, particularly as Trump has had trouble finding top-flight lawyers to join his legal team.
Jay Sekulow, one of Trump's private attorneys, called Dowd a "friend" and said he "has been a valuable member of our legal team."
"We will continue our ongoing representation of the President and our cooperation with the Office of Special Counsel," Sekulow said in a statement.
The New York Times and
The Washington Post first reported Dowd's resignation.
As the investigation seems to be intensifying, the President, according to multiple sources, is convinced he needs to take the reins of his own legal strategy and Trump has recently pushed to bring new attorneys onto his team.
The shift distressed some of his lawyers, namely Dowd, who felt blindsided and insulted by the President's hire of diGenova and other shifts, privately threatening to quit before ultimately resigning on Thursday, two sources said.
Trump had also continued to speak regularly with Marc Kasowitz, his longtime lawyer who stepped back from leading the team months ago but still remained involved.
Kasowitz had long recommended that Trump take a more aggressive posture toward the Mueller investigation. That strategy was on the backburner as Dowd and Ty Cobb, the White House's special counsel on the matter, worked with Mueller and urged the President to refrain from appearing to publicly undermine the Mueller investigation. Now that has all changed, as the President has reverted to his initial strategy to attack. An experienced cable news commentator, diGenova shares the President's view that the FBI and the Justice Department have waged a corrupt battle against him.
Dowd also faced criticism over his handling of the response to the guilty plea of Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who became the first Trump administration official to face charges in Mueller's investigation.
Dowd landed himself and the President in hot water after a tweet he says he authored suggested Trump knew Flynn lied to the FBI in January, reviving questions of whether Trump committed obstruction of justice when he allegedly asked then-FBI Director James Comey to drop the Flynn investigation.
"I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies," the tweet on Trump's account said.
The tweet led Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to note that the committee is investigating obstruction of justice and said: "What we're beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice."
In a testy exchange with CNN, Dowd said he authored the tweet, but then suggested it was incorrect, claiming that "at the time of the firing no one including Justice had accused Flynn of lying."
He declined to answer additional questions, saying: "Enough already ... I don't feed the haters."
The response was characteristic of Dowd's hard-charging style, which initially endeared him to the President and made him the lead attorney on the President's legal team after Kasowitz was asked to step back in July.
The latest shake-up now leaves questions about whether Trump's legal team will pursue the strategy that Dowd laid out in the wake of Flynn's guilty plea, when Dowd claimed that Trump could not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice because he is the US President and therefore its "chief law enforcement officer."
Dowd's claim signaled the President's legal team plans to rely on an untested theory that is heavily disputed by legal scholars: whether a sitting President can be charged with obstruction of justice or indicted at all.
(CNN) The resignation of John Dowd, Donald Trump's top personal attorney, is the latest -- and largest -- signal that the President of the United States is shifting his strategy in regards special counsel Bob Mueller's ongoing probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Even as
Mueller's questions for Trump have come into much sharper relief over the past 10 days, Trump has upped his personal attacks on the former FBI director even while
adding controversial conservative attorney/talking head Joseph di Genova to his team. And now, the Dowd resignation.
The message is unmistakable: The closer Mueller and his team move to Trump himself -- the terms of an interview between the special counsel and the President remain a matter of considerable debate -- the more the President appears to be bracing for a very negative end result from the probe and putting the pieces in places to win the PR battle that will follow the conclusion of the Mueller probe.
Remember that Dowd was part of the legal braintrust that assured Trump that this whole Mueller probe would be wrapped up by the end of the year, that there was absolutely nothing to worry about and that the best course of action for Trump was to ignore Mueller.
What appears to have dawned on Trump is that playing nice (or his version of nice) with Mueller isn't working. Mueller doesn't appear to be moving to end the probe any time soon and he seems disinclined to treat Trump nicely. Of course, this was always a ridiculous supposition by Trump: Mueller is leading a criminal probe and will go wherever the evidence leads. The idea that he would go easy on the President because Trump didn't attack him by name is totally without grounding in anything we know about Mueller.
But, that certainly seems like the bill of goods that Trump's legal team sold to the President, likely as a way to manage his worst instincts when it came to the Mueller probe. This is all taken care of, boss, you can imagine them telling Trump. It's all going to be over soon and you are going to be very happy with the results.
Trump bought that view -- or at least didn't outright dismiss it -- for quite a while. And, less than two weeks ago, he was insisting that reports that he was plotting a shakeup of his legal team was false.
Tweeted Trump: "The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job and have shown conclusively that there was no Collusion with Russia."
That veil has been torn off for Trump now -- likely the result of the
face-to-face meeting late last week between his lawyers and the special counsel's office in which Mueller and his team went over the areas they are interested in talking to the president about: The June 2016 meeting with the Russians at Trump Tower, his role in crafting a statement from his son Don Jr. about that meeting, his firing of Mike Flynn as the national security adviser and the firing of James Comey as FBI director.
What that meeting seems to drive home for Trump is the reality of his situation. And the fact that the "play nice" strategy with Mueller had gotten him exactly zilch.
And so, Trump began taking matters into his own hands. The hiring of di Genova, an attorney who has regularly espoused the idea that there is a deep-state conspiracy within the government trying to frame Trump for Russia's election meddling, was the first sign of the change. Then came Trump's tweets over the weekend -- in which he called out Mueller by name and, wrongly, said there were 13 Democrats on Mueller's team. The resignation of Dowd feels of a piece with those moves.
This is all Trump taking back control of his own messaging around the special counsel investigation. He tried it "their" way. Now he is going to do it his way.
And what is Trump's way? A relentless effort to undermine Mueller and those who work for him in hopes of discrediting whatever the special counsel ultimately finds. If Trump, di Genova and the rest can sell the idea to the conservative base that Mueller -- a Republican who was appointed FBI director by George W. Bush -- is a partisan Democrat pursuing the Deep State's anti-Trump agenda, then it lessens the blow of whatever Mueller finds. OF course Mueller's report is negative about Trumpworld! He's part of the establishment! And all that.
The simple fact is this: Trump has come to the realization that Mueller has backed him into a corner. And when Trump's back is against the wall, he reverts back to what (and who) he knows best. And that's attack, attack, attack. Get ready. Because that's what's coming.
