Former Trump attorney Ty Cobb says that Robert Mueller is “an American hero,” and disagrees with the president that the Russia probe is a politically motivated witch hunt.
“I don’t feel the same way about Mueller,” the 68-year-old Cobb told ABC News in an extensive interview. “I don’t feel the investigation is a witch hunt.”
That said – while Cobb sees Mueller and his investigation as legitimate, he doesn’t think President Trump will suffer any political harm, and that the bulk of the findings have already been revealed in the form of sentencing memos and highly detailed “speaking indictments” filed against a group of 34 defendants. These include Russian hackers and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The indictment against the Russian hackers was “highly detailed,” he said. “And there’s no link to Trump or the campaign. The same thing with Manafort — they just filed an 800-page sentencing memorandum, and in 800 pages there’s no reference to collusion,” Cobb said, referring to Manafort, who was convicted last year of tax and bank fraud charges and pleaded guilty in a separate case to conspiracy charges brought by Mueller as part of his probe. –ABC News
Cobb was in charge of the Baltimore US Attorney’s office before transitioning into private practice. He joined the Trump White House approximately six months into the new administration, where he felt his obligation was not the president per se – but “the presidency.”
“My legal obligations were to the institution,” Cobb told ABC.
He also disagreed with former colleague John Dowd – a defense attorney on Trump’s team who recently said he considered the Mueller probe “one of the greatest frauds this country’s ever seen..”
“Yeah. I don’t share that view,” said Cobb – who apparently isn’t familiar with how it started or what it’s become.
“I think Bob Mueller’s an American hero … even though he came from an, arguably, privileged background, he has a backbone of steel. He walked into a firefight in Vietnam to pull out one of his injured colleagues and was appropriately honored for that. I’ve known him for 30 years as a prosecutor and a friend. And I think the world of Bob Mueller. He is a very deliberate guy. But he’s also a class act. And a very justice-oriented person.”
Cobb said his experienced [sic] matched with the description offered by many of the people who have interacted with Mueller’s team. “I can’t be critical,” he said. “I never had a bad interaction with Mueller or his staff.”
At times, Cobb clashed with his former White House colleagues over legal strategy, advocating dignified cooperation that led the administration to share thousands of documents with Mueller’s team and made officials available for interviews. But the team only was able to proceed with that strategy because Trump agreed with it, Cobb said.
“I was the one that advised it. But the president did make the decision,” Cobb said. –ABC News
Cobb grew to be at odds with White House attorney Dowd and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, as the president appeared to favor a more combative approach to Cobb’s cooperation. After ten months, Cobb left the White House.
“In my first nine-and-a-half months … I was able to prevent the president from going on the attack against Mueller,” said Cobb. “It wasn’t really until Dowd sent out a critical tweet of Mueller and Rudy joined the team that the president felt unleashed.”
Cobb also says that the investigations into Trump are “never going to be over,” adding “I mean, this is going to go through 2020. And if the president is reelected, it’ll go beyond that.“
Read a transcript of Cobb’s interview here, and listen to the interview here.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Uk1HJv Tyler Durden