President Donald Trump’s decision to talk off the cuff about the Russia probe to reporters allowed him to put out his version of events — but increased the legal risks to him, as well as to his children and the growing number of associates who have been pulled into the expanding investigation.

Every public statement by the president or others involved opens a line of questioning for special counsel Robert Mueller or lawmakers exploring the contacts between Trump associates and Russia during the 2016 election.


Like the president’s tweets, his interviews can be used to establish facts or intent, offering investigators a gold mine of information but potentially creating conflicts for others that can lead to headaches for their various lawyers — or to criminal charges including perjury or obstruction of justice.

“The more attention that is given to this it harms everybody,” said Robert Bennett, a Washington lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and is a longtime law partner of Ty Cobb, who the White House announced on Sunday will join the administration to handle media and legal strategy.

Bennett called the president’s remarks Wednesday to The New York Times a “real mistake” and “totally counterproductive,” especially the apparent warnings directed at Mueller to limit the scope of his work.

The New York Times interview published Wednesday night was Trump being Trump, an unvarnished expression of his disdain over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia investigation, questioning Mueller’s impartiality and shifting to a “I don’t remember” defense instead of an outright denial regarding the details of a momentous February Oval Office conversation with then-FBI Director James Comey that has put the president himself in the cross hairs for a potential obstruction of justice charge.

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Others in the family have taken a similar approach. Donald Trump Jr. last week tried to pre-empt news stories about his June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer by tweeting out his own emails, confirming his enthusiasm for sitting down with the Russian and putting new information into the public record about how the meeting came about.

By contrast, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, who also attended the meeting, lay low, releasing carefully worded comments through his lawyer and referring questions to Trump Jr., who remains in New York overseeing the Trump Organization.

“You may be under the impression that there’s this very large organically and elegantly coordinated interaction between lawyers,” said Alan Futerfas, who signed on in June as Trump Jr.’s attorney. “At this point, that’s not my experience.”

The radically different responses of the brothers-in-law may ultimately drive a wedge between them as the federal and congressional investigations proceed.

“Trump Jr.’s decision to make those statements personally, instead of via an attorney, was poor strategy and could conflict with Kushner's interests,” said Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago. “Ultimately, his decision to stake out a public position could make it harder for Kushner’s team to align its efforts with his.”

The same is true of other current and former Trump aides and associates caught up in the investigation. Vice President Mike Pence has said that Flynn, the former White House national security adviser, lied to him about his calls with Russian officials during the post-election transition. Flynn, meantime, has alarmed his former colleagues by asking for an immunity deal in which he would testify to Congress.

The complications for Trump staffers and their lawyers are multi-faceted. The investigation has already ensnared Trump and some of his closest family members, many of whom work together in the White House, and all of whom have their own attorneys, split between Washington and New York.

“It’s impossible for the lawyers to work together if their clients aren’t getting along or on the same page,” said William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who represented Vice President Dick Cheney’s senior aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, during the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. “A smooth, well-plied defense is one thing, but if the clients are not facilitating that, then it’s impossible.”

White House officials had originally wanted to keep their whole Russia response operation out of the building but eventually realized Trump needed someone who could respond in a moment's notice, to defuse situations and to "try and make him listen," according to a White House aide. His lead attorney, Marc Kasowitz, is in New York and can't handle the daily machinations of that, this person said.

Enter Cobb, who in an email to POLITICO said he won’t formally start his new role until July 31. On Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Cobb did not sign off on a Trump tweet sent that morning that defended his eldest son organizing and participating in a meeting with the Russians for opposition materials on Clinton.

“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” Trump tweeted on Monday.

The haphazard White House communications strategy has confounded lawyers representing others in the investigation. That also goes for the erratic behavior exhibited by Kasowitz — who apologized last week after sending profane emails to a person who privately criticized him — and his counterpart Jay Sekulow, who has made confusing statements on television, including appearing to suggest in a television interview on Sunday that the Secret Service had vetted the Russian participants at the Trump Tower meeting, a claim the Secret Service denied.

“Here you’ve got a crowd of folks who are not part of the club and that’s clearly going to affect the level of trust, cooperation and information sharing,” said one white-collar Washington attorney with a client involved in the Russia probe. “That’s going to be a blood clot in the arteries of what’s going on here.”

“I’d characterize it as a volatile situation,” the attorney added. “The difficult thing is the more volatile it is the less likely it is to get fixed.”

Another attorney working the Russia probe described a “constant guessing game” about how other Trump associates are responding to investigators — particularly former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Flynn. Both men had lawyers before Mueller was appointed in mid-May, raising questions about whether they have started cooperating with the government.

A Flynn attorney declined to comment when asked whether the retired Army lieutenant general was helping federal investigators. Manafort is not a government witness, according to his spokesman, Jason Maloni. “Paul’s been forthcoming, but he’s not a cooperating witness and any suggestion to that effect is silly,” he said.

Experts in White House scandal management say it’s no wonder the president and those in both his inner and outer circles keep causing problems for one another with their divergent legal and communications strategies in a case that could bring serious political, professional and personal consequences.

“I think it starts at the top,” said Adam Goldberg, a former Clinton White House special associate counsel. “They don’t have someone they can believe in. Trump is ready to throw anybody over the side. Once you have that, that doesn’t inspire loyalty. It inspires leaks. It incentivizes self-protection and everyone looking out for themselves. I’m sure everyone there is doing it. It’s a virus that spreads in that kind of atmosphere.”

Defense lawyers on the Russia case are also running up against the inevitable complications of trying to independently represent family members who also work together — for the president.

Abbe Lowell, for example, met with Trump around the time he took over as lead lawyer for Kushner's defense on the Russia probe, according to a White House official and a person close to the administration. Lowell, one of the country’s leading criminal defense attorneys, knows he has to both defend Kushner and look out for the interests of his father-in-law, according to a person who has spoken to him. “This is a family. He knows that he has to look out for everyone's interests,” said a person familiar with Lowell's thinking.

Several of the attorneys bring established relationships to the case. Take Lowell’s former law partner, Scott Balber. He represented the Miss Universe contest when it was owned by Trump, and he also was the real estate mogul’s attorney in a 2013 lawsuit Trump filed against Bill Maher after the comedian and television host promised to donate $5 million to charity if Trump could prove he wasn’t “the love child of a human woman and an orangutan from the Brooklyn zoo.”

Now, Balber is representing Russian musical pop star Emin Agalarov and his father Aras, as well as Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a Russian lawyer and business associate who attended the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

“There are a lot of people with different levels of involvement and different levels of interest. Yeah, that makes it challenging,” Balber said in an interview.

Robert Buschel, a Fort Lauderdale-based attorney representing longtime Trump associate Roger Stone, said the attorneys working on various aspects of the Russia case are inevitably going to rub one another the wrong way.

“You get a bunch of lawyers and lawyers have their respective egos and their respective experiences and so they may clash over time,” he said.

Most important in such a complex case, he added, is trying to establish a “recognized hierarchy” — especially when multiple lawyers from multiple law firms have a role in the case and it’s unclear who is making decisions and communicating with everyone from Mueller to congressional committees and the press.

“It looks bad obviously if one guy says the light is red and someone else is saying the light is green,” he said. “Coordination is critical.”

But there shouldn’t be too much coordination either. Attorneys working on the Trump case can benefit from either formal or informal information sharing agreements useful for people with similar interests. Such pacts are protected under attorney-client privilege and can be helpful for giving different lawyers a heads-up when Mueller’s team calls, or what questions investigators have asked or what documents they’ve requested. It’s also useful for sharing clients’ recollection of events.

But these kinds of partnerships can get tricky, especially in a high-profile case where prosecutors are already on the lookout for collusion.

“The broader you make it, the more the government is going to chafe at it. It starts to look like the five families,” said Stanley Brand, a white-collar attorney who represented White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos during the probe of President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater land deals.

Considering concerns among attorneys that Flynn or Manafort could be tempted to work with the government — Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) last month told CNN “all of the signals” suggest Flynn was cooperating with federal officials — these information sharing agreements can also end up in the hands of someone who can hurt you.

“Sometimes they cause more trouble than they’re worth,” Jeffress said. “You’ve got to know how far you can trust the other people.”

