In public, Vice President Mike Pence has been among Donald Trump’s most unwavering, faithful defenders, offering reliably ingenuous support of the president in his pan-Midwestern monotone. “It is the greatest privilege of my life to serve as the vice president to a president who is keeping his word to the American people,” he said Monday during the administration’s first full Cabinet meeting. But behind the scenes, Pence is taking steps to shield himself against the stain of scandal that is quickly spreading through the West Wing. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia picks up steam—and expands to include an inquiry into obstruction of justice—Pence has taken the step of hiring a criminal defense lawyer to guide him through the tangled web of allegations hanging over the White House.

After interviewing a series of candidates, Pence reportedly hired former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Richard Cullen, now the chairman and a senior litigation partner at the firm McGuireWoods, which, incidentally, is where former F.B.I. director James Comey—recently fired by Trump and a now a key figure in any potential obstruction of justice charge—was once briefly a partner. In fact, Cullen is godfather to Comey’s daughter. (This Town, indeed.)

Uncomfortable personal attachments aside, this is not the first time high-profile clients have called upon Cullen while embroiled in political scandal. As The New York Times reports, he worked as a staff member in the office of the late M. Caldwell Butler, a Republican congressman, during Watergate, and was also special counsel to Senator Paul S. Tribble Jr., who served on the Senate select committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal. He also represented Sepp Blatter, the disgraced president of soccer’s international governing body, who was removed from his post after a notorious global corruption case in 2015. Many soccer officials were criminally charged. Blatter, so far, has not been.

Pence is likely a peripheral figure in the Russia probe, having joined the Trump ticket late in the presidential campaign. “The vice president is focused entirely on his duties and promoting the president's agenda and looks forward to a swift conclusion of this matter,” Jarrod Agen, Pence’s communications director, said, when confirming Cullen's hiring, which was initially reported by The Washington Post. But he may prove a critical witness in Mueller’s probe, nonetheless. While Pence has studiously maintained his distance from Trump’s greatest scandals, the vice president’s conspicuous lack of insider knowledge has raised suspicions. Critics have wondered how it is possible that Pence allegedly never knew that former national security adviser Mike Flynn was working as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey when he joined the administration, despite having led the White House transition team that was in charge of vetting candidates. Pence was also allegedly blindsided when reports emerged that Flynn had undisclosed conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and was left out of the loop again when Trump fired Comey (in part over his persistence in investigating Flynn).

Pence loyalists chalk up these miscommunications to “organizational gaps”. But Pence’s convenient ability to stay out of trouble has fueled whispers in Washington that his comparatively unblemished tenure in the White House could position him to step into the Oval Office should the need arise. “I think some [Republican lawmakers] are doing some scenario planning,” Republican strategist Rick Wilson told my colleague Abigail Tracy last month, shortly after Pence took the unusual step of launching his own political action committee. “A lot of them are protecting him and keeping him sort of a little bit above the fray, because they would like to have a backup plan just in case.”

That said, it’s not unusual for a vice president to hire an outside lawyer when deemed necessary. Spiro T. Agnew, Richard Nixon’s No. 2, sought external counsel when he came under investigation for extortion, notes the Post, and Al Gore and Dick Cheney both hired attorneys on occasion. But the pattern of this investigation so far suggests that what began as a wide-ranging inquiry into dozens of potential crimes has, under Mueller, begun to focus on a more concrete case of obstruction. If Pence did hire Cullen merely as a precautionary measure, his counsel might soon turn out to be absolutely necessary.