In “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff reported that Mark Corallo quit in part over President Donald Trump's role in crafting a statement for Donald Trump Jr. regarding the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. | Leon Neal/Getty Images Former Trump spokesman named in Wolff book lawyers up

A former spokesman for President Donald Trump’s legal team has retained a pair of experienced Washington scandal attorneys after himself becoming a part of the Russia investigation, according to a source familiar with the hiring.

Mark Corallo has hired the husband-wife attorney duo of Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova in anticipation of requests for interviews by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators and Congress. He hasn’t yet heard from the investigative bodies, the source said.


Toensing, a former Reagan Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general, already has one client in the Russia case. She represents Sam Clovis, a Trump 2016 campaign official who supervised foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty in October for lying to the FBI.

Toensing's legal partner and husband, diGenova, is a former Reagan-era U.S. attorney later appointed to serve as an independent counsel to investigate whether aides to President George H.W. Bush violated federal law by searching Bill Clinton’s passport files during the 1992 presidential campaign. No indictments were filed in that case.

Corallo is expecting requests for interviews about his brief two-month stint inside Trump’s legal team. He was initially offered the job as White House communications director last May but instead opted to work for the president as the main spokesman for personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz.

That relationship ended in mid-July when Corallo resigned out of frustration with warring factions surrounding Trump and the lawyers assigned to the case — and also because of concern he didn’t have all the information about the case, POLITICO reported at the time.

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In his book, “Fire and Fury” published earlier this month, author Michael Wolff reported that Corallo quit in part over Trump's role in crafting a statement for his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., regarding a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower the younger Trump attended to meet a Russian attorney promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The White House has offered shifting explanations as more detail has made clear the initial statement, crafted on Air Force One as Trump returned from a July trip to Europe — misleadingly said it mainly focused on the subject of Russia's adoption policy.

“Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer the phone,” Wolff wrote. “Later that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome — and privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice — quit.”

White House officials and Trump himself have denounced Wolff's book as inaccurate.

Kasowitz also stepped back as the lead Trump attorney at the same time as the president’s legal strategy evolved to include new White House attorney Ty Cobb and, externally on personal matters, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow.

Corallo is a former George W. Bush Justice Department spokesman who served under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. He also was a spokesman for the House oversight panel that investigated Bill Clinton in the 1990s.