Since the end of July, President Donald Trump has noticeably tempered his public complaints about the Russia investigation, avoiding any Twitter allusions to a “witch hunt” or threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.

That’s partly due to the intervention of White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who since joining the administration 2½ months ago has impressed upon Trump the risks of using such loaded language when it comes to Mueller, according to a White House official and several sources familiar with the president’s legal strategy.


Cobb’s ability to keep Trump’s Russia rage under control is going to be tested in the months ahead as Mueller’s probe heats up. The special counsel’s team is interviewing current and former White House officials and campaign staffers, as well as the president’s own family members, in its sprawling investigation.

Solomon Wisenberg, a former deputy on Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton, credited Cobb with having “a very salutary effect” on Trump. “It’s one thing to have an adviser to tell you, ‘Boy, if you say this it’s not good politics, it’s not good for us,’” he said. “It’s another thing to have your white-collar lawyer say, ‘This is extremely harmful to you legally to say this.’”

Cobb’s job — for which he’s putting in upward of 85 hours a week — includes reviewing a vast database of internal documents relevant to the Russia probe and also speaking with reporters, though he has studiously avoided television appearances. Five staffers now work for him full time at the White House, including Steven Groves, who stepped down in August from his job as chief of staff to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

In an interview, Cobb said he can’t take credit for the change in the president’s tone on Russia, and notes that John Kelly took over as White House chief of staff the same week he arrived. But, Cobb said, it’s the president who really changed course, endorsing a move toward greater cooperation in hopes of speeding Mueller’s probe to a close.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“He did it,” Cobb said of Trump.

Now, Cobb says, “we’ve got a good relationship in terms of trust” with Mueller. “They know the effort we’ve put into it,” he added.

It’s a dramatic turnaround from earlier this year, when Trump’s legal team was based in New York under the leadership of his longtime personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, who often served as the president’s attack dog — including at a June appearance at the National Press Club during which he declared Trump’s innocence and suggested that ousted FBI Director James Comey had lied under oath to Congress.

Privately, Kasowitz had also tried but failed to get the president to stop tweeting about the Russia investigation in April and May, just before Trump’s firing of Comey prompted the appointment of Mueller, according to a person familiar with Trump’s legal strategy. “He was very well aware of the stakes of his tweeting and the ramifications of what could take place,” this person said.

Kasowitz stepped away in July amid frustration with the president’s behavior and has since been replaced by John Dowd and Jay Sekulow as Trump’s lead personal attorneys, while Cobb is working alongside White House Counsel Don McGahn. While Cobb represents the White House itself, Dowd and Sekulow deal with Trump’s personal legal issues, including Mueller’s probe into possible obstruction of justice surrounding the Comey firing. The three attorneys are in regular communication and keep one other apprised of some aspects of their work, like their schedules, Cobb said.

Robert Bennett, a former personal attorney for Clinton and Cobb’s longtime law partner, said the president’s attorneys had given Trump certain legal heft and appeared to have helped in tamping down some of the most potentially damaging aspects of his earlier behavior. “I know John and Ty are two very forceful advocates with a lot of experience,” said Bennett. “My surmise is they had an impact.”

Cobb works out of a windowless office in the West Wing, not far from the Situation Room and White House mess hall—though he has to go through the office of a communication staffer just to get to his desk.

He started out reporting directly to Trump, a precondition he insisted upon when taking the job early this summer, though that arrangement changed with the arrival of Kelly, who now serves as a gatekeeper to the Oval Office. Cobb didn’t know the president beforehand — someone who has long experience with civil litigation, but wasn’t familiar with how a high-stakes Washington investigation works.

Cobb has extensive experience on Washington special counsel investigations going back decades. He represented several individuals pulled into the Starr probe, which started with the Clintons’ Whitewater land deal. He also had clients who were dragged into separate cases examining Clinton’s secretaries of Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development, and he represented Eli Segal, the head of Clinton’s AmeriCorps national service program who was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing during an independent counsel probe into alleged conflicts of interest.

He also served as a top investigator who examined the corruption allegations against Ronald Reagan’s HUD secretary, Samuel Pierce. That case didn’t result in any charges against Pierce but 17 others were indicted and convicted over the course of the five-year probe. And he represented one of the lawyers caught up in the Iran-Contra investigation.

Trump’s attorneys haven’t been able to stop Trump from making any comments on Mueller’s investigation. In a Fox News interview earlier this month, the president called the Russia probe “an excuse used by the Democrats when they lost the election.” And last week, Trump tweeted the suggestion that the Democratic Party, FBI or Kremlin could have helped pay for a dossier of salacious but unverified information about ties between him, his 2016 campaign and the Russian government.

Those comments, however, were in marked contrast with Trump’s off-the-cuff and legally troublesome responses on Russia from the first half of the year. His Twitter posts alone — a May warning that Comey “better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” — have been described as invitations to sharp lines of questioning from Mueller.

Trump also has drawn scrutiny for several moves right before Cobb, Kelly and others joined the White House, including his decision to skirt his own attorney when he reportedly dictated his son’s initial public statement to the press explaining the reason for a 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. That statement, written aboard Air Force One, said Donald Trump Jr. “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” – even though his son later released emails showing the meeting was offered as a chance to see damaging material about Hillary Clinton.

Trump in mid-July — with only one communications staffer present — also gave a controversial Oval Office interview to The New York Times in which he said he regretted hiring Attorney General Jeff Sessions because of his recusal from the Russia probe and also called it a “violation” for Mueller to examine his family finances beyond Russia.

Working as one of the president’s attorneys is hardly a risk-free endeavor. John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, became a federal government witness who exposed the details of the Watergate cover-up. Several of Clinton’s top White House lawyers, including Bernard Nussbaum, Bruce Lindsey, Beth Nolan and Jack Quinn, ended up on the witness stand or other legal crosshairs themselves amid the Democratic president’s scandals. And a federal judge ordered Harriet Miers, President George W. Bush’s top counsel, to testify before Congress over the firings of U.S. attorneys.

“It’s an office in which you can take some heavy fire,” said Robert Bauer, the former White House counsel under Barack Obama, the only president in the post-Watergate years who didn’t face an independent investigation during his time in office.

Indeed, some of Trump’s attorneys are already facing legal jeopardy. Michael Cohen, one of Trump’s longest serving personal attorneys, has his own lawyer and remains on the radar of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which just postponed a public hearing previously scheduled for Wednesday to examine his role in the Russia probe. McGahn, the Trump White House counsel, has also retained a lawyer and is expected to soon follow his former colleagues Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer to be questioned by Mueller’s team about his role in several early moves that have become central parts of the Russia investigation, including the hiring and firing of Michael Flynn, who briefly served as White House national security adviser, and the ousting of Comey.

Several other Trump lawyers — both inside and outside the White House — could face more intense questions over their role in the Russia response. Mueller is reportedly interested in speaking with James Burnham, a former senior associate counsel in McGahn’s office who now works in the Justice Department’s civil division.

Two other McGahn deputies have confirmed roles in the Russia response: Stefan Passantino, who has been a main point of contact for the Office of Government Ethics as it examines the establishment of a legal defense fund for Trump staffers, and Greg Katsas, who last week acknowledged during his Senate confirmation hearing for a seat on a key federal appeals court that he’d given legal advice “on a few discrete legal questions” involving the White House response to the Russia probe.

Breaking News Alerts Get breaking news when it happens — in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Kasowitz could also be a potential witness over the role he played earlier this year by reportedly suggesting to White House aides they didn’t yet need to hire their own attorneys. As Trump’s personal lawyer, he can lean on attorney-client privilege, but legal experts say his interactions with the president’s government employees could put him in Mueller’s sights. “It’s potentially obstruction, not to put too fine a point on it,” said a lawyer representing another client mired in the Russia probe.

Sekulow, Trump’s other outside attorney alongside Dowd, could face questions for the public statements he made to the media earlier this summer minimizing the president’s role in crafting the response to the Times story about Donald Trump Jr.'s 2016 campaign meeting with the Russian attorney promising Clinton dirt, according to legal experts.

While Cobb, Dodd and Kelly have helped to tamp down the president’s recent statements on the Russia probe, they can’t erase the problems that Trump and his previous legal advisers created for themselves, said Ross Garber, a white-collar defense attorney who has defended three Republican governors during impeachment proceedings: Alabama’s Robert Bentley, South Carolina’s Mark Sanford and Connecticut’s John Rowland. Garber added that Sekulow’s multiple appearances on television publicly discussing the Trump case could set up a legal fight over whether he retains his complete right to attorney-client privilege involving conversations with the president.

“The way this was organized at the beginning,” Garber said, “would have put the actions of the lawyers and the spokesmen and especially the lawyer-spokesman on the radar screen.”

In an interview, Sekulow said his attorney-client privilege with Trump remains in place. And he said he isn’t expecting to be personally pulled into Mueller’s Russia probe. “I’ve not heard from Bob [Mueller]. I’m not planning on hearing from him. And I don’t have a lawyer,” he said.

Dowd declined comment for this story.

Cobb and Dowd have gained notoriety in other ways too. They became front-page fodder in the New York Times after a reporter overheard their public conversation on the patio at BLT Steak in downtown Washington about how much cooperation Trump should give Mueller.

Cobb last month also got duped by an email prankster who was impersonating a White House aide, a flap he said in an interview became a “complete distraction” and had prompted a threefold spike in new attempts to lure him into similar conversations.

“I always try to be responsive. Even the haters. I try to calm them down,” Cobb said. “My view is I like people. I try to see the better nature in people. I hate to see people just viscerally angry. I responded to those with great success for the first couple of weeks. Now it’s in a different mode.”

