The president’s decision to hire Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer isn’t a sign the White House is bracing for Congress to make a move against Donald Trump, says the president’s exiting attorney Ty Cobb.
The retiring lawyer is being replaced by Emmet Flood, a hard-charging attorney whose resume reads like a who’s who of government scandals in Washington and includes the former Democratic president’s impeachment 20 years ago.
‘Yes, he was on that team. Yes, he’s one of the few people with presidential experience in impeachment,’ Cobb told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview. ‘But I’m not sure that that actually is that consequential because I don’t think people here are planning for impeachment.’
‘But it’s good to have somebody that has some experience,’ he added.
The president’s decision to hire Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer isn’t a sign the White House is bracing for Congress to make a move against Donald Trump, says the president’s exiting attorney Ty Cobb. He’s seen here getting in his car on Thursday afternoon
Cobb spoke on the eve of his departure from the White House after a 10-month stint serving as a lawyer to the president.
Trump brought Cobb in to serve as the White House’s official liaison to the special counsel’s probe. He handed off his responsibilities to Flood, a former partner at Williams and Connolly, last week as he began a transition back to being a private citizen.
Flood counts former Vice President Dick Cheney and former President George W. Bush among his past clients, in addition to Clinton. He worked in Bush’s White House for two years as the point -man on congressional investigatory matters.
![The retiring lawyer is being replaced by Emmet Flood, a hard-charging attorney whose resume reads like a who's who of government scandals, including the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/05/18/16/4C657E3B00000578-5744823-image-m-31_1526656944219.jpg)
The retiring lawyer is being replaced by Emmet Flood, a hard-charging attorney whose resume reads like a who’s who of government scandals, including the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago
‘I’ve met him. He’s highly regarded and experienced and well-educated and smart,’ Cobb said of his replacement, ‘and I’m sure he’ll do a great job.’
Flood is inheriting the position nearly a year to the day that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to probe Russia’s election-meddling in response to President Trump’s decision to fire FBI director James Comey.
Cobb publicly predicted last year that the investigation would begin wrapping up by the Christmas holidays. Not only has it continued, but it shows no signs of stopping despite calls from the president and his personal attorneys for the Justice Department to finish it.
Cobb said that while he was unable to shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the ongoing probe, ‘it’s the right time for me to leave. I finished the bulk of what I was going to do. I got all the documents in in October.’
‘All the key interviews should have been completed by the end of the year, but they ended up getting completed in early January,’ he said. ‘We were on a track at that point to get some things accomplished with the special counsel in January, and that didn’t happen, and since then it has sort of been a reactive mode.’
One key interview in the probe has not taken place yet: a proposed sit-down between Mueller and the President of the United States.
Trump’s personal attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, had considered May 17 – the investigation’s first anniversary – as D-day for deciding whether the president would willingly talk.
On cue, Giuliani said the president’s legal team would prep him for questioning after his June 12 nuclear summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Cobb mostly deferred to Flood and Giuliani, saying it would be up to them to chart a course for the president’s interview.
He also left the president’s messy dealings with his ex-attorney Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels to Trump’s team of personal lawyers.
‘I have not been involved in anything concerning Michael Cohen, and have never met the man,’ Cobb asserted.
But he did get to know Mueller’s team, and holds them in high regard despite Trump’s repeated characterizations of them as ’13 Angry Democrats.’
‘I’ve had a very professional relationship with the office of special counsel. We have negotiated in a principled way though many obstacles. I respect them as lawyers,’ he said.
Trump’s full-scale assault on Rosenstein and other DOJ officials this year prompted speculation that the president was considering a ‘Saturday Night Massacre’-style housecleaning–something that would have rubbed Cobb the wrong way.
‘I like Rod, but I’m not a bomb thrower,’ he said of the deputy attorney general. ‘And I think he’s got a difficult job. And it will basically be for others to decide what the relationship is between the White House and the Justice Department on a going-forward basis.’
Cobb arranged most interviews with White House employees and the special counsel’s office. They were represented by their own individual lawyers; but Cobb said he was not concerned about anything they might have shared with the DOJ.
‘I don’t have any reason to believe that there was any negative information about the president,’ he said, ‘but I’m not privy to what it is they actually said.’
Cobb’s first day at the White House was also Chief of Staff John Kelly’s.
The retired Marine Corps general’s arrival signaled the end of a chaotic beginning to the White House that has had lingering repercussions.
‘I think Kelly’s a highly-principled indefatigable leader. I think he’s had great influence here,’ Cobb said of the president’s most senior West Wing aide.
But Kelly’s waning influence has coincided with the return of embarrassing White House leaks.
Cobb declined to confirm whether the White House is conducting a formal investigation of aides who leak material to reporters. But he observed: ‘Leaks are the bane of any administration’s existence.’
A former federal prosecutor who headed the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force for the Mid-Atlantic region and spent 30 years chasing bribery and corruption cases around the world, Cobb said he appreciated that his White House job involved ‘so little travel.’
‘And of course having the Navy mess at a discount,’ he said of the exclusive dining room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. ‘That was good.’
Reflecting on his service, Cobb said, ‘I’m not a stress guy. In my career, I’ve spent months wearing a bullet proof vest carrying a gun, avoiding death threats, traveling 200,000 miles a year to every corner of the world.’
But having Donald Trump as a client, he said, ‘was certainly a unique assignment.’