Regardless of whether another lawyer would have fared better, it seems clear that Trump’s legal team is in trouble and operating largely in the dark. “The reality is that you have got to get to exactly what happened,” said Andrew Hall, who represented former Richard Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman during the Watergate scandal. “You don’t know what happened and then you don’t know what version is being told because like all other things, no two witnesses see the exact same event exactly the same way.” During the Watergate scandal, the best thing you could do is “you get in and you keep digging and digging and digging,” he explained. “You are never going to know what the prosecutors know or not but actually you want to know more than what they know. You want to find out what everybody has said about your client and where that fits in the big picture.”

Garber, who also serves as a criminal defense attorney, concurred. “It seems though that there really isn’t an appreciation for the seriousness of the potential problem and the amount of coordination and work that has to be done,” he said. “And ultimately it is the client who controls that. It is the client who controls who the lawyers are and how many there are and at the end of the day, how they work together—or how they don’t.”

Of course, collating the testimony of dozens of witnesses—all of whom may be fearful of their own legal exposure—is no easy task. “Every one of these witnesses need private, retained counsel—every single one,” Hall told me, noting that Dowd’s ability to communicate with witnesses would have been limited by tampering laws. “They are government employees, they need to have lawyers and those lawyers need to coordinate with other lawyers that are representing other witnesses,” he said. “You have to have each one of these witnesses basically feel safe that they have somebody only in their camp and that if they are about to do something harmful to the president, then the president’s lawyer needs to find it out but it can’t be tampering with evidence—there is a big difference. That’s what gets you into trouble, the tampering and the cover-up.”

That process has been made all the more difficult by the rapid turnover within Trump’s team. Dowd and Ty Cobb, who formerly represented the White House in the Russia probe, reportedly pushed for cooperation with Mueller, betting that he would be exonerated. Other members of Trumpworld strenuously disagreed: former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Times that Trump “finds himself in a legal mess today because of their incompetence.” Since then, Emmet Flood, a veteran of the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings, is said to have taken a less cooperative approach to Mueller and reportedly blocked Chief of Staff John Kelly from speaking with the special counsel.

The result, as Hall put it to me, has been a patchwork legal defense without any unifying theory of the case. “They seem to have a lot of agendas but no strategy so far has been forthcoming.” (Another Washington defense attorney disagreed, arguing that Mueller would likely have successfully subpoenaed all the information he needed anyway.)

The graver mistake, according to legal experts I spoke with, is that the Trump team underestimated the Mueller threat and failed to staff up in the face of it. “I have been surprised by the apparent small size of the legal team representing the White House and the president and other witnesses,” Garber told me. “In past investigations of the White House under other administrations, the legal teams were quite large and well-resourced and even in much less significant cases, you see legal teams with better resources. . . . This is a complicated investigation.” Hall echoed the sentiment, noting that beyond the personal lawyers for Trump and other witnesses, there should be a team of 15 to 20 investigators either working for Trump in a personal capacity or the Republican National Committee trying to glean as much information as Mueller.

If the Trump team has, in fact, failed to do a deep dive into what witnesses know and what they might spill to Mueller, it might be too late to make up lost ground. As Garber explained, getting information from witnesses “gets more complicated because typically people move from cooperating together to splintering off and some becoming cooperators for the government . . . at the point that somebody becomes a cooperator for the government, the flow of information back to folks that are not cooperating with the government generally ceases.”