Former Trump Lawyer Ty Cobb: ‘I Regret’ Team Trump’s Attacks on Mueller
Ty Cobb, who was part of the Trump legal team during the Mueller investigation, spoke to Kristen Welker on MSNBC this afternoon about the report and some lingering questions.
Welker opened by asking why President Donald Trump never ended up sitting down with special counsel Robert Mueller at the end of it all.
“I was not involved in those negotiations to the degree that I think the public believes,” he responded. “That was handled by his personal counsel, but under the case law, given the cooperation that was provided by the White House and voluntary production of all documents, voluntary interviews of all people in the White House, the case law suggests that there may be no necessity to sit for an interview.”
He called the written answers to Mueller’s questions a “good compromise.”
Welker brought up previous reporting on a mock interview session that “did not go as well as” John Dowd had hoped for, asking, “Do you acknowledge there were concerns the president may misspeak or say something perceived as being not true and that that could ultimately hurt him?”
“I think the concern really was, was it a perjury trap,” he responded, bringing up George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn. “I think there were genuine concerns at some point that based on the negotiations that they had to get the scope to a reasonable point in order to be confident that the president can answer the questions factually.”
At one point Welker noted the attacks on Mueller from Rudy Giuliani, contrasting it with Cobb’s own approach. (Cobb left the Trump legal team in May 2018 weeks after Giuliani joined.) She asked, “Did their strategy work?”
Cobb responded, “Their approach was not my approach. Their approach certainly drove up the negatives of the Mueller investigation. I would have liked to see both sides leave the investigation behind with sufficient dignity and I think that dignity sort of being restored in the wake of the results which showed that Mueller was the honorable balls-and-strikes guy that I thought he would be.”
Welker asked if those attacks “stripped away the dignity of the process.”
Cobb again noted how it drove up Mueller’s negatives and how that was “beneficial for the president.”
He added, “I regret that it came to that. Over the course of the long battle, particularly when in the president’s years that he was wrongly accused and that this was just a political exercise that had been initiated well before he was even in office, I think his frustrations were––he wore ’em on his sleeve and he didn’t hesitate to call them out.”
You can watch above, via MSNBC.
[image via screengrab]
