Bauer was withering when asked about the possibility that fellow New York attorney Marc Kasowitz might rejoin Trump’s team, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported last week. “There is nothing I know of that qualifies Mr. Kasowitz to take something like this on except that the president knows him and has had a good experience with him in the areas in which Mr. Kasowitz does practice.”

It is incredible to imagine that the president of the United States—a billionaire—should be unable to secure proper representation. But Trump is hardly the ordinary presidential client. A tightfisted septuagenarian with an itchy Twitter finger, Trump is as infamous for stiffing contractors as he is for his mean streak—hardly winsome character traits for top-flight attorneys with their choice of assignments. “You’re kidding right?” one Washington defense lawyer spat last year when I asked about the challenges of representing Trump. “Representing this guy would be almost an impossibility. I mean I don’t know who would want to do that.”

Hours before news broke that diGenova and Toensing would not be joining his legal team, Trump tried to throw cold water on the narrative that he couldn’t find a good lawyer. “Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case . . . don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on,” he wrote Sunday on Twitter. “Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted.” But other members of the bar are skeptical. “If he says many lawyers are willing to work for him, that may only be true because we have a country with a huge number of lawyers in it,” Bauer said. “But how many of the willing ones would have the credentials and experience for the job?” Other members of the White House, after all, have had no trouble securing representation. White House counsel Donald McGahn, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and erstwhile chief of staff Reince Priebus are all being represented by William Burck, for example. (Burck reportedly turned down a chance to work for the president.) Abbe Lowell, another heavy hitter, is representing Jared Kushner.

Trump, meanwhile, keeps giving prospective law firms more reasons not to work with him. “Trump’s latest tweets reflect his low opinion of lawyers which is only one reason lawyers who care about their reputation don’t want to represent him,” Jeffress told me. “He will no doubt find a lawyer eager to represent him but most lawyers are not.”

Given the sheer number of lawyers representing clients in Mueller’s probe, it is possible, too, that a small town like Washington is simply running out of white-shoe firms without conflicts. That was, after all, the reason that diGenova and Toensing ostensibly parted ways with Trump. Toensing has been representing Mark Corallo, who represented Trump’s legal team last year, before resigning in the wake of revelations about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer.

Such a prosaic explanation, however, could mask more ominous concerns. “What happened between last week, when DiGenova and Toensing were announced as joining the team, and yesterday?” mused Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Obama. “The conflict of interest issue was apparent on Tuesday, and yet we were told they were joining the team and that Mark Corallo (the person with the most significant conflict) had waived any concern. Then Dowd resigns Thursday, and yet by Sunday DiGenova and Toensing are gone, leaving the president with only two lawyers.” That strange development, Katyal posited to me, suggests that Robert Mueller may have intervened. “Diligent prosecutors, when they see a defendant doing something profoundly dangerous to their self-interest (including hiring lawyers who have conflicts), will raise it with the defendant and suggest they rethink it,” he explained. “I think it very possible that that happened here—Mueller is a scrupulous prosecutor and may have told Trump he had concerns about Trump’s own rights. If it did happen, it would strongly suggest that Mueller is formally thinking of Trump as a target of his investigation . . . A prosecutor would issue such a warning to a target, not to a witness.”