Ty Cobb’s time running point for Donald Trump on all things Russia has not been without incident. Back in September, the mustachioed lawyer was overheard loudly debating the White House’s legal strategy outside BLT Steak in Washington, leading to an embarrassing New York Times scoop about the team’s internal schisms, and he’d drawn repeated criticism for promising that the Russia probe would conclude by Thanksgiving (it didn’t). Nevertheless, when Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced Cobb’s resignation this week, she did so in a manner that can only be described as glowing. “Ty Cobb, a friend of the president, who has done a terrific job, will be retiring at the end of the month,” she said, adding that Emmet Flood, a lawyer from Bill Clinton’s impeachment defense team, would take his place.

Though the White House claimed that Cobb had been discussing his retirement for several weeks, and that the move to hire Flood had been in the works for months, the news proved irresistible to Steve Bannon, who leapt at the chance to claw his way back into Trump’s good graces. “Cobb was a mistake, totally incompetent and in over his head. He was obsessed with this radical fantasy of waiving executive privilege,” Bannon told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa. “It was truly stupid . . . [he] failed to realize that there would never be, could never be a special relationship” with Robert Mueller’s team. He made similar remarks to the Times, calling Cobb’s approach “reckless” and adding, “unfortunately, you cannot undo the serious damage he has caused the president and the presidency.”

Cobb responded scathingly—“I don’t pay attention to Steve Bannon,” he told the Times. “I’ve seen all his documents.”

His retort effectively extinguished the skirmish, but Bannon’s no-holds-barred strategy—blaming the failings of Trump’s legal team on its individual members—is likely to become more commonplace as Mueller turns up the heat. The former White House adviser took a similar tack in April, lampooning Cobb for “turn[ing] over everything without due process,” and advising Trump to assert executive privilege “immediately and retroactively” by claiming that his lawyers—namely Cobb, who had consistently advocated for cooperating with Mueller—were incompetent.

At the time, Trump responded with a subtweet, declaring that he had “full confidence” in Cobb. But by all accounts the president’s situation is far worse than it was even a month ago, as he faces down the very real possibility of a Mueller subpoena—“He’ll have to testify,” Washington defense attorney Sol Wisenberg told my colleague Abigail Tracy recently, “there’s no question about that”—and falls back on old friends to keep his legal team staffed—old friends who then go on national television to undermine his defense in three separate cases. As the pressure mounts, so too does the likelihood that Trump will turn, Bannon-style, on his own troops, in desperate search of a fall guy. When the president kicks off the blame game, evidence shows, his subordinates are more than happy to follow suit. And the last thing Trump’s rickety legal team needs as Mueller circles overhead is an internal civil war.