President Donald Trump’s legal team is still struggling to understand the scope of the investigations into the President and what his legal exposure might be, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
According to more than 12 people close to Trump who spoke to the Times, the team of nearly a dozen lawyers working for the President have only a partial idea of what many of Trump’s former business associates and senior members of the administration have told investigators. They’re also largely unaware of what the Justice Department plans to do with information it obtains on Trump from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and the investigation into his former attorney Michael Cohen. It’s unclear if Trump has even disclosed a full accounting to his lawyers of his time running the Trump Organization or some of the most contentious events of his presidency thus far, the Times reported.
According to the Times, some of the blame for the gap in knowledge falls on former Trump lawyer John Dowd, who reportedly never investigated Trump’s actual legal exposure and relied on the President’s denials of wrongdoing instead.
While Dowd was working for Trump, Mueller interviewed at least 10 administration officials, who were never debriefed by the President’s lawyers after the questioning, according to the Times, which would’ve given the legal team insight into what Mueller knew.
After Dowd left the White House, his team spent at least 20 hours interviewing Trump about key events of his time as president.
