Last week we got word that Donald J. Trump, the garbage fire that grew up to be a Real Boy, was hiring a conspiracy-peddling lawyer he had seen on his teevee. He had been watching his idiot box, and Joseph E. diGenova appeared to opine on how the investigation into Russian election hacking and propaganda was in fact a secret conspiracy by the FBI to throw the election to Hillary Clinton and/or make Donald J. Trump look bad. Hire that idiot, he said, and his aides scurried to comply.
Alas, 'tis not to be.
But in a statement on Sunday, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said both diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, who is also a lawyer, would not be working on the Russia probe. [...]
Trump had not closely researched diGenova or even consulted with top aides, including Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and White House counsel Donald McGahn, before hiring him.
The official line is that diGenova and Toensing could not be Donald's lawyers because they are already representing multiple other Republicans caught up in the probe. As always in this White House, the truth is less clear.
According to two people told of details about the meeting, the president did not believe he had personal chemistry with Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing.
That's probably spin. What probably happened is that the pair of crackpot lawyers turned down the crackpot "billionaire" known for stiffing the people he works with, for reasons that may have had to do with conflicts or may not have, and Donald turned that into "well I didn't like you ANYWAY" in one of his usual efforts to save face.
The most immediate effect of this nixed plan to hire Television Conspiracy Lawyer is that Trump's legal team is now looking mighty thin indeed. Top lawyer John Dowd is out, allegedly because he no longer felt effective and/or because he was so peeved at the efforts to recruit diGenova; efforts to recruit others, like Ted Olson, have turned Trump down. And when a sitting President of the United States is having a difficult time lining up lawyers to defend him from charges of obstructing justice and collaborating with foreign espionage efforts, that is itself a hell of a thing, isn't it?