Trump’s attorneys: Giuliani, Sekulow, Emmet Flood, Martin and Jane Raskin, Ty Cobb, Andrew Ekonomou, John Dowd and Joanna Hendon, among others
Current status: Closed after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III released his report in March 2019.
Case summary: After a nearly two-year investigation, Mueller released a summary saying he did not find that Trump or his campaign schemed with Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. While Trump immediately celebrated the news as a “total exoneration,” Mueller reached no conclusion about whether the president obstructed justice.
Trump’s legal team during the probe was split into two components, with Flood and Cobb representing the White House and a group of lawyers that personally represented Trump. The group included the Raskins, a husband and wife who practice law together at a small firm in a Miami suburb. Trump saw how Dowd resigned over disagreements he had with him and that several prominent law firms declined to take the case. So Trump hired the couple after meeting with them just once, impressed by the former federal prosecutors who most notably got an aircraft maintenance company acquitted of most of the charges in a case connected to the 1996 crash of a ValuJet plane that killed 110 people.
Trump’s lawyers had seized on a portion of the letter that said Mueller recognized “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.” Years before the other legal troubles came up, Trump lamented facing Mueller’s investigation.
“It’s a shame that our country had to go through this, to be honest,” he said in 2019. “It’s a shame that your president has had to go through this.”
Jacqueline Alemany, Holly Bailey, Devlin Barrett, Kim Bellware, Mark Berman, Philip Bump, Josh Dawsey, Amy Gardner, Rosalind S. Helderman, Shayna Jacobs, Michael Kranish, Carol D. Leonnig, David Ovalle, Andrea Salcedo, Perry Stein and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.
