Giuliani to join Trump's legal team

“The president said: ‘Rudy is great. He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country,'” Sekulow said in a statement.

The three new lawyers give Trump a broader legal stable to rely on as he faces not just the special counsel, Robert Mueller, but the threat of an investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan into the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. Federal agents raided Cohen’s office and hotel room last week.

Trump has a difficult time retaining top-flight lawyers as the inquiries have increasingly unsettled him, and he has angrily chafed against his lawyers’ legal strategies.

Trump and his associates believe the issues in New York pose a far greater challenge to the president than even Mueller’s investigation. They do not know what was taken from Cohen’s office, and it is not clear what exactly investigators are looking into. But the fact that authorities were able to get a federal judge to give them permission to raid Cohen’s office and residences has led Trump and his associates to believe the government possesses some evidence of wrongdoing by Cohen.

In hiring Giuliani, Trump has turned to someone who is a reliable, loyal surrogate and an attack dog on television. Giuliani is a former top official at the Justice Department and served as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. But at age 73 he is no longer known as a powerhouse white-collar litigator and in recent years has been more active as a worldwide consultant.

One person close to Trump said the Raskins will be the longer-term and more durable additions to the team. Giuliani, by contrast, is coming on board as a short-timer not only to appear on television but also to see if he can use his decades-long ties with Mueller to re-establish a working relationship with the special counsel’s team. The relationship between the president’s lawyers and Mueller’s team blew up after agents raided Cohen.

Giuliani’s main focus will be on bringing an end to Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice and links between his campaign and Russia. As part of those efforts, Giuliani will take the lead dealing with Mueller’s office on an interview with Trump. The president and his lawyers do not believe Trump has any real legal exposure but are wary of the interview. At the same time, though, they have determined that for Mueller to complete his inquiry in a timely manner, Trump will need to sit down for questioning. Giuliani plans to try to work with Mueller to come up with a way to question Trump that both sides are comfortable with.

The addition of Giuliani comes at a particularly tumultuous time for the president. Last month the president’s lead lawyer, John Dowd, quit the team after he determined the president was not following his advice. For much of the past month, the team has been led by Sekulow, who has had to assemble a new group of lawyers to deal with the issues in New York and another team to confront Mueller.

At the same time, Mueller has been pressuring Trump to sit down for an interview. The president, who initially said he was eager to answer Mueller’s questions under oath, is said to be more skeptical of an interview in the wake of the raid on Cohen’s office.

After Dowd quit, many well-known lawyers turned down the opportunity to join the president’s legal team. Some said that they did not believe Trump would listen to them and that their firms did not want to be associated with the president. But after the raid on Cohen, many more lawyers have become interested in working for Trump, according to people briefed on the matter. The lawyers believe the government overstepped its bounds by executing a warrant at a lawyer’s office and have contended the government violated the attorney-client privilege between Cohen and his clients.

Trump negotiated the discussions to have Giuliani join his team with Giuliani directly, a person close to the process said. Trump had repeatedly offered Giuliani the job of attorney general during the transition, but Giuliani turned it down because he wanted to be secretary of state.

Trump turned to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to be attorney general, but has publicly criticized Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia inquiry. Trump has said that Sessions should be protecting him from the inquiry.

Some close to the president believe he could try to replace Sessions with Giuliani in the coming months, although Giuliani would face an extremely difficult confirmation hearing in the Senate. When Giuliani sought the secretary of state job, Trump advisers, including the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, raised concerns about his business dealings and paid speeches to a shadowy Iranian opposition group that until 2012 was on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Giuliani will be taking a leave of absence from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, while he works for Trump. Three people close to the former mayor said that Greenberg Traurig lawyers were distressed that Giuliani was taking on the new role. Many at the firm were already uncomfortable with Giuliani’s work for the Trump campaign, his outspoken opinions and his role in helping to write the president’s first travel ban that affected mostly Muslim countries.

James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired, is critical of Giuliani in his new book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.” (Giuliani was Comey’s boss when Comey went to work for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan in 1987.)

“Though Giuliani’s confidence was exciting, it fed an imperial style that severely narrowed the circle of people with whom he interacted, something I didn’t realize was dangerous until much later: a leader needs the truth, but an emperor does not consistently hear it from his underlings,” Comey wrote.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Giuliani to join Trump's legal team

Trump will also bring on Jane Serene Raskin and Martin R. Raskin, former federal prosecutors based in Florida, according to Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow. Giuliani is himself a former federal prosecutor.

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