Donald Trump’s lawyer needs a lawyer. Just over a week after ditching his previous attorney, suggesting it was unnecessary for him to have legal representation, Rudy Giuliani is back on the hunt for a defense team, CNN reports. The move seems to reflect the precarious legal situation for the president’s personal attorney, who is the subject of a criminal probe but continues to insist that his shady work in Ukraine was on the level and that he and his client are being unfairly targeted.

“Let me make it clear that everything I did was to discover evidence to defend my client against false charges,” Giuliani wrote in a characteristically bizarre, self-pitying tweet Wednesday evening. “Dems would be horrified by the attacks on me, if my client was a terrorist. But they don’t believe [Trump] has rights.”

Giuliani has made a habit of thumbing his nose at investigators. Claiming incorrectly last week that the Trump impeachment inquiry is “not authorized,” the former New York mayor vowed not to cooperate with the “abomination” and parted ways with his attorney. It would be “silly to have a lawyer when I don’t need one,” he told the New York Daily News last week. But with the pressure mounting in the impeachment inquiry after bombshell testimony by diplomat Bill Taylor detailed Trump’s efforts to arrange a quid pro quo with Kiev, and the criminal investigation into Giuliani now reportedly including a counterintelligence probe, it appears that having a lawyer no longer seems so “silly.”

Giuliani is smack in the center of the Ukraine scandal that has engulfed Trump’s presidency. Having helped spark the president’s conspiratorial thinking about the country, he publicly solicited a Ukrainian investigation into Joe Biden this spring and, it seems, ran something of a shadow State department for Trump. The president diverted work on issues related to Ukraine to Giuliani from traditional diplomatic channels, European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland testified last week. Trump’s lawyer—working with Sondland, Rick Perry, and envoy Kurt Volker—operated on an “irregular” foreign policy track that ran “contrary to the goals of longstanding U.S. policy” and that undercut America’s relationship with Ukraine, said Taylor, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine who objected to the approach in text messages.

Such revelations have been bad for both Trump and Giuliani, and they could get worse. In spite of desperate stunts from the president’s defenders, Democrats are continuing to investigate the apparent shakedown, reportedly accelerating the pace of their inquiry after testimony from Taylor. Meanwhile, a judge Wednesday ordered the release of communications between Trump, Giuliani, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo related to Ukraine. It’s perhaps no coincidence that reports of Giuliani looking to lawyer up emerged the same day Judge Christopher Cooper’s ruling came down. “The judge zeroed in on communications with Rudy Giuliani to be most subject to public disclosure,” American Oversight Executive Director Austin Evers told reporters Wednesday. “Why? Because he doesn't work for the government.”

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