Whether or not “the Russia thing” is fake news, as Donald Trump claimed after firing the F.B.I. director investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia, the president isn’t taking any chances. With the Senate accelerating its Russian probe, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network sniffing around Trump’s financial records, a special counsel appointed to oversee the F.B.I.’s investigation, and Mike Flynn pleading the Fifth, Trump is officially lawyering up. According to NBC News, the president will retain Marc Kasowitz, his longtime lawyer and a close associate, to represent him on all things Russia.
Kasowitz is likely to be one component of a larger crisis-management response team Trump is reportedly assembling outside the White House to handle any communications, public relations, and legal matters related to the multifaceted Russian scandal. He is also, crucially, somebody the president trusts to handle his affairs with diligence and discretion. As The Wall Street Journal notes, Kasowitz had represented Trump for over 15 years, and was unofficially his “go-to guy” for whenever he was involved in difficult cases. Often, they involved defamation claims: Kasowitz represented Trump when the real-estate developer sued an author for implying he was not as wealthy as he claimed, and when he mulled suing The New York Times for publishing an article about two women who claimed the then-presidential candidate had groped them. “Marc is not worried about suing over what’s right for his client, even if it offends others,” hedge-fund manager Paul Rivett, who has hired Kasowitz in the past, told the Journal. (Kasowitz also represented Bill O’Reilly when the Fox News host was embroiled in the sexual-harassment scandal that eventually saw him ousted from Fox News.)
Although Kasowitz has represented Trump successfully in the past, he’ll have his work cut out for him now that his longtime client under constant media scrutiny. Trump’s careless chatter has repeatedly gotten him in trouble before, such as when he allegedly instructed Rudy Giuliani to help him devise a “legal” Muslim ban—a conversation that was cited by multiple federal courts in striking down his executive order banning immigration from majority-Muslim countries—or when he revealed highly sensitive Israeli intelligence to Russian officials in the Oval Office. One hopes, for Kasowitz’s sake, that he can do a better job reining in the president than White House general counsel Don McGahn, who failed to stop the president from taping an NBC News interview in which he noted that he had fired James Comey at least in part because he wouldn’t stop investigating the Trump campaign—handing Democrats what some legal experts have described as a prima facie case of obstruction of justice.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the Trump administration if there wasn’t at least one eyebrow-raising connection to Russia. As BuzzFeed reported back in March, Kasowitz is also currently defending OJSC Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-run bank, in a major lawsuit. (He’s not the first Trump-retained lawyer to work closely with Russia, either.) He also works at the same law firm as Joe Lieberman, who was previously rumored to be Trump’s top choice to lead the F.B.I. Shortly after the reports that Trump had retained Kasowitz, CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz reported that Lieberman was taken out of consideration for the job.
