Welcome back to Trump Watch, where I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I was captivated by the twin spectacles that unfolded Tuesday in Alexandria, Virginia, and Manhattan courtrooms. Today, I'm looking at the lawyers in President Donald Trump's life and how they've piled onto some of his legal woes. Also, the Virginia trial of Paul Manafort may be over, but it's hardly the end of the former Trump campaign chairman's legal saga. Scroll down for a quick preview of his D.C. trial.

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(l-r) Jeff Sessions, Michael Cohen, and Don McGahn.

 

How Lawyers Made Trump's Life a Nightmare This Week

 

It has been, by all accounts, a nightmarish week for the president. He saw his former campaign chair Paul Manafort convicted of tax and bank fraud on Tuesday.

It's become clear that the president—who once bemoaned “Where's my Roy Cohn”—prizes loyalty in his lawyers. But this week, it was the attorneys in Trump's life who ultimately spelled the most trouble for him, and even deepened his legal and political woes.

➤ The first development to stun the Trump world was the revelation, reported by the New York Times, that White House Counsel Donald McGahn has spoken extensively with the special counsel about whether Trump obstructed justice while in office. It's said that McGahn participated in “at least three voluntary interviews,” about thirty hours' worth over the span of nine months.

“So this is a very big deal,” Carrie Cordero, former counsel to the assistant attorney general of the National Security Division, tweeted.

McGahn has witnessed, of course, the behind-the-scenes of several episodes that might be of interest to Mueller, including Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey, and the near-dismissals of the special counsel.

“I have long believed that Mueller will conclude that Trump obstructed justice, but I did so based on press reports. Mueller can't rely on news reports—he needs eyewitnesses. It wasn't a guarantee that he would have a strong eyewitness to Trump's obstructive acts. Now he does,” Renato Mariotti, a Thompson Coburn partner and former federal prosecutor, tweeted.

➤ The biggest development of the week, and by far the largest legal headache for the president: Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney and fixer, pleaded guilty to a number of felonies, and told a Manhattan federal judge under oath that a candidate (AKA: Donald Trump) directed him to facilitate hush payments to two women—Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal—with whom Trump has allegedly had affairs. This, Cohen said, was done for the “principal purpose of influencing the election.”

➤ Attorney General Jeff Sessions has often found himself at the receiving end of the president's many barbs and broadsides. On Thursday, he punched back. It came after Trump attacked Sessions in a Fox News interview, saying Sessions “never took control” of the Justice Department. And that's when the country's top law enforcement officer responded: “While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations,” Sessions said in a statement.

The Trump-Sessions contretemps of course followed some pretty severe legal blows that prosecutors landed against two of Trump's former top dogs. But the dust-up also came at a remarkable moment Tuesday morning when senators began signalling that Sessions could be nearing the end of his time at DOJ: Sens. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, and Lindsey Graham both hinted to reporters that Trump might move to replace his attorney general after the 2018 midterm elections. Whoever replaces Sessions, who is recused from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia interference in the presidential election, could ultimately affect that work.

“Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants,” Trump tweeted in a response Friday morning, “so look into all of the corruption on the 'other side' including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr……”

He continued, “Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!”

➤The president's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani trotted out the line “truth isn't truth” in an interview on NBC's “Meet the Press” Sunday. That phrase came in an exchange with host Chuck Todd over whether Trump should sit for an interview with Mueller. When Giuliani insisted that such an interview would be a perjury trap, Todd replied that truth was truth. That prompted Giuliani's phrase: “No, it isn't truth. Truth isn't truth.” The line, while not immediately damaging for the president, was an unforced error that quickly lit up social media.

More Ahead for Manafort: Another Trial

 

Paul Manafort's trial in Washington, if we get there, promises to be more interesting than what we just had in Virginia.

There are still a number of things that could spring up before we get to that September 17 start date, such as a plea deal or a presidential pardon. But if the trial does proceed, there's little question it will pack the pressure on Paul Manafort and his legal team.

On paper, there are some pretty obvious differences between the two trials.

“The Virginia case is fundamentally a fraud case, including tax fraud, the result of an investigation begun before the Special Counsel was appointed and inherited by him,” David Kris, founder of the consulting firm Culper Partners and former chief of the DOJ's National Security Division, said last week. “The D.C. case, by contrast, appears to have been developed by the Special Counsel and concerns Manafort's lobbying and related activity on behalf of the pro-Russian Party of Regions in Ukraine, as well as obstruction of justice.”

Indeed, in Washington, Manafort is fighting charges of money laundering, obstructing and conspiring to obstruct justice, and failing to disclose his past lobbying work for the Russia-backed government of Ukraine.

More than that, Manafort will face a different kind of uphill climb in D.C., with a judge, a jury, and a prosecution team unlikely to cut him any breaks.

Judge T.S. Ellis III, the alternately humorous and cantankerous force in the Eastern District of Virginia trial, was often a thorn in prosecution's side. But the judge overseeing the case in Washington, Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, will likely strike a different tone. She's sided with prosecutors on most pre-trial motions, and indeed, it was Judge Jackson who ordered Manafort to jail in June, after the special counsel's office accused Manafort of attempting to tamper with witnesses while out on bail.

Prosecutors are also expected to introduce more evidence in this trial than they did in Virginia. In a court filing last week, Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing said the special counsel's team provided counsel “with well over 1,000 proposed exhibits—most of which have not been a part of the trial before Judge Ellis.” That said, Jackson also told the government in an order that it was “encouraged to review the exhibit list closely with an eye towards streamlining the presentation of its case.”

Either way, Manafort can expect a heavy spotlight on his consulting work in Ukraine: much of the evidence in the Washington trial will center around Manafort's past lobbying schemes on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, prime minister of Ukraine between 2010 and 2014, and the Party of Regions, the pro-Russian political party Yanukovych led.

Who will argue the case in D.C.? That's not immediately clear. Manafort is expected to keep his legal team: Kevin Downing, Richard Westling, Thomas Zehnle, Jay Nanavati and Brian Ketcham. On the government side, Greg Andres, who led the prosecution in Virginia, has also come up before Jackson in the District. Jeannie Rhee, another special counsel lawyer who has worked on the Concord Management case, also entered appearance in Manafort's D.C. case this week.

How do we count up these numbers? You might ask why there's a discrepancy between the total number of Article III pending nominations, and the sum of the Supreme Court, appellate, and district court pending nominations. That's because we include pending nominations for the U.S. Court of International Trade in our overall count (it's an Article III court, after all), but it's not listed in the court-by-court breakdown of pending nominations. We leave out the Court of Federal Claims from both counts—that's an Article I court.

One other thing I might as well clear up: The number of nominations pending includes those for future vacancies, not just existing vacancies.