Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team of a dozen-plus lawyers and investigators have proven stealthy in their wide-ranging Russia probe. They have surprised the White House with one indictment after another, and summoned President Trump's confidants for lengthy interviews. In the case of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort alone, court filings show, they have collected more than 400,000 documents and 36 electronic devices. 
 
 Mueller and his deputies are, in the fearful word of some Trump loyalists, "killers." 
 
 Trump's response, by contrast, is being directed by John M. Dowd, the president's personal lawyer retired from a large firm who works essentially as a one-man band, and Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer who works out of a small office in the West Wing basement, near the cafeteria where staffers get lunch. 
 
 Dowd and Cobb, along with attorney Jay Sekulow, serve not only as Trump's lawyers but also as his strategists, publicists, therapists and — based on Dowd's claim that he wrote a controversial presidential tweet — ghostwriters. 
 
 When Mueller requests documents, they provide them. When Trump reacts to new twists in the Russia saga, they seek to calm him down. When he has questions about the law, such as the Logan Act or Magnitsky Act, they explain it. And when the president frets that Mueller may be getting too close to him, they assure him he has done nothing wrong, urge him to resist attacking the special counsel and insist that the investigation is wrapping up — first, they said, by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas and now by early next year. 
 
 As lawyers for the world's highest-profile client, Dowd and Cobb have come under scrutiny for their every move and utterance — and the criticism has been harsh. 
 
 Many in the Washington legal community chide them as being indiscreet, error-prone and outmatched. They say public blunders — such as Dowd and Cobb casually chatting about their legal strategy on the patio of a downtown Washington steakhouse in September within earshot of a reporter — suggest a lack of discipline. 
 
 Critics also question why, seven months into Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, they have not assembled a battalion of lawyers as President Bill Clinton had when he was being investigated by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. And some Trump loyalists, spoiling for a fight, say the president's lawyers should be combative rather than cooperative with Mueller. 
 
 "There certainly have been gaffes," said Alan Dershowitz, a criminal defense attorney and Harvard Law School professor who has won praise from Trump for his television appearances defending a president's constitutional prerogative to fire his FBI director. 
 
 "These are not the kinds of things that one would expect from the most powerful man in America, who has a choice of anybody to be his defense counsel," Dershowitz said. "Well — almost anybody," he added, saying that he is not interested in the job. 
 
 [Trump’s legal team faces tensions — and a client who often takes his own counsel] 
 
 
 
 Lawyer Ty Cobb, left, in 2004 and Jay Sekulow, in 2015. The two, along with John Dowd, are representing President Trump in the Russia probe, serving as his strategists, publicists and therapists. (AP photos/AP photos) 
 
 This portrait of Trump's legal team and defense strategy is based on interviews with more than two dozen White House officials, lawyers and other people connected to the Russia probe, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. 
 
 The chorus of criticism may be growing louder, but Trump is not singing along. By most accounts, the president is satisfied with his representation — and talks to Cobb several times a day — though advisers say he has occasionally discussed bringing on new lawyers. 
 
 Trump, 71, connects with Dowd, 76, and Cobb, in his mid-60s, as contemporaries. He appreciates their no-nonsense old-school style, and likes that neither appears on television, believing their absence from the airwaves deprives what he calls the Russia "witch hunt" of oxygen, according to Trump's advisers. 
 
 A former Marine Corps captain, Dowd has a gruff demeanor and has proven able at times to cool Trump's temper and convince him of the virtues of pragmatism over pugnacity, aides said. 
 
 Some Trump advisers dismiss Cobb's predictions that the Mueller probe is nearing its conclusions as misleading happy talk, but the president has internalized it as reality. One reason for Trump's faith is his belief that his lawyers are plugged in. Cobb tells him he is in frequent, and sometimes daily, contact with the special counsel's office, according to people familiar with the dynamic. 
 
 Over Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump boasted to friends that Cobb was "brilliant" and that he was certain Mueller would soon exonerate him. 
 
 Cobb declined to comment, and Dowd responded to an email inquiry with two words: "No, thanks." 
 
 White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "The president is happy with his legal team." 
 
 Cobb works as a White House lawyer whose salary is paid by the government, and his duty is to the office of the presidency, whereas Dowd and Sekulow are employed by Trump and represent him personally. Dowd and Sekulow enjoy attorney-client privilege, but Cobb does not — meaning that Mueller could seek access to Cobb's notes or ask to interview him about his interactions with the president. 
 
 [Trump lawyer John Dowd brought down Pete Rose. Almost 30 years later, they’re still fighting.] 
 
 Mark Corallo, a Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, served as spokesman for Trump's legal team earlier this year. Corallo is no longer involved, but he praised Dowd and Cobb as "titans." 
 
 "They've been at the top of their profession and were on the shortlist of the top 10 attorneys you would call if you got your knickers in a twist," Corallo said. He added, "One thing I like is Cobb and Dowd are of the same generation as the president. They are contemporaries. There is a comfort that comes with being able to talk with somebody who shares your experience in the world." 
 
 Still, there have been moments of tension. Last Tuesday, anxiety ran high early in the morning because of a report out of Germany that Mueller's office had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records related to the transactions of Trump and people close to him. 
 
 Trump was unnerved, but his lawyers tried to soothe his irritation and scrambled to determine whether the report was accurate, aware that if Mueller were digging into Trump's finances, he would be crossing a red line the president had publicly set, according to three people familiar with the discussions. After the lawyers consulted with the special counsel's office, Sekulow issued a statement that afternoon saying that Trump's team had confirmed there was no subpoena for Trump's records. 
 
 The Trump administration's key people in the Russia investigation — including the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner — are represented by different attorneys. But some of the various lawyers, along with Dowd and Cobb, cooperate by sharing information on regular conference calls about questions their clients have been asked and documents they have turned over. 
 
 Witnesses in Mueller's probe and their lawyers have reported back to Cobb and Dowd that the special counsel's team has asked detailed questions about Trump's May firing of James B. Comey as FBI director, leading them to believe that Mueller may be gathering evidence of obstruction of justice, according to one witness. 
 
 But Cobb and Dowd have told Trump he has no vulnerability, officials said. Dowd went so far as to posit last week to Axios that a president cannot obstruct justice because of his constitutional powers as the chief law enforcement officer — an interpretation that was mocked by some legal scholars. 
 
 [A bold new legal defense for Trump: Presidents cannot obstruct justice] 
 
 On Dec. 2, Trump tweeted that he fired Michael Flynn as national security adviser in part because he had lied to the FBI — an admission that could become evidence in an obstruction investigation. Dowd claimed he drafted the tweet, and fellow lawyers privately said they could not believe a statement so careless was written not by the impulsive president but by his lawyer. 
 
 One of Trump's advisers told the president that weekend: "The first job of a lawyer is to shut up. The second job of a lawyer is to keep their client's mouth shut. I don't know why they're tweeting and talking and trying to explain the tweet," according to someone with knowledge of the conversation. 
 
 People close to the Trump legal team argue that additional lawyers could result in a more proactive and careful approach. "It's amazing the stress and magnitude of representing the president of the United States," said one person familiar with the inner workings. "You'd have to be super human to do it alone. You've got 16 of the best lawyers in the country going up against you." 
 
 For Trump, being under the glare of a legal investigation is familiar territory. A real estate developer and reality-television star before becoming a politician, he has spent much of his professional life enmeshed in litigation. 
 
 When Mueller's Russia investigation began in May, Trump hired as his lead attorney Marc Kasowitz, a litigator from New York with a brawler reputation who had represented Trump and his companies off and on for years in divorce, bankruptcy and other proceedings. 
 
 In the early weeks of the Mueller probe, the hard-charging Kasowitz would scurry in and out of the Oval Office and the adjoining dining room in what aides described as a running — and at times frenzied — commentary with Trump about all things Russia. 
 
 But Kasowitz had scant experience in Washington and with investigations like Mueller's. After he caused a kerfuffle by sending an expletive-laced and disparaging email to a stranger who had criticized him, Kasowitz departed the Russia legal team. He continues to represent Trump in some other matters. 
 
 [When Trump goes looking for a media brawl, this feared lawyer steps in] 
 
 Trump tried to hire or has considered hiring more than a half dozen top litigators to help manage the Russia probe, including William A. Burck, Mark Filip, Emmet Flood, Robert J. Giuffra, Ted B. Olson and Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., according to several people with knowledge of the president's deliberations. For various reasons, none took the job. 
 
 "If you're the president of the United States, typically the top lawyers are lining up to pitch you," said one person close to the White House and familiar with the legal team's dynamics. "Here, you have the opposite." 
 
 Bob Bauer, who was President Barack Obama's White House counsel, said in assessing the Trump legal team: "Some people may want to blame the lawyers, but my principal question is, 'How do you represent a client like Trump?' And at what point do these lawyers decide they're so hemmed in, so compromised by his behavior, his impulses, his tweets, that they just can't represent him effectively?" 
 
 The face of the legal team has been Sekulow, who has deep ties to the Christian right, though he has adopted a lower profile since the spring and summer when he was a frequent television presence. 
 
 Cobb, who had been a partner at Hogan Lovells, enjoys a reputation as a seasoned white-collar advocate whose last high-stakes legal case involving Washington politics was in the 1990s. Dowd has been a higher-profile criminal defender and represented Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during a 1990 ethics investigation into whether McCain had improperly intervened in a savings and loan probe. He is perhaps best known for representing the commissioner of baseball in the late 1980s and producing the "Dowd Report," a document that resulted in Pete Rose's lifetime suspension from the sport. 
 
 Dowd was widely perceived by other lawyers to be in the twilight of his career, having formally retired in 2015 from Akin Gump, where he had worked since 1990. 
 
 Dowd lost one of his most recent big cases when his client, hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, was convicted in 2011 on insider trading charges in New York. Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney prosecuting Rajaratnam, reflected on facing Dowd in that trial in an episode last week of his podcast, "Stay Tuned with Preet." 
 
 "John Dowd said a lot of — how shall I put it? — ludicrous, silly things," said Bharara, who was fired as U.S. attorney two months into the Trump administration. 
 
 At one point, Dowd was filmed swearing at and flashing his middle finger at reporters covering the trial. It garnered him unflattering press coverage — but it was the kind of dramatic move that a client like Trump could see as an attribute. 
 
 Sari Horwitz and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report. ||||| Trump Taps Washington Lawyer To Become White House Special Counsel Amid Russia Probes 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Susan Walsh/AP Susan Walsh/AP 
 
 President Trump has hired a former federal prosecutor to assist in how the White House handles its response to the expanding Russia probes. 
 
 Ty Cobb, whose legal expertise lies in white-collar crime and congressional investigations, will be "in charge of overseeing the White House legal and media response" to the investigations, according to Bloomberg News. 
 
 The White House confirmed Cobb's appointment as special counsel on the president's staff in a statement Saturday. However, no further details about the veteran Washington lawyer's upcoming role inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. were provided. 
 
 A bio on the website of Cobb's former firm, Hogan Lovells, says that "Clients managing crises, allegations of corruption, and other critical matters turn to Ty to guide them." 
 
 That's probably why the White House turned to Cobb. Over the last week, the Trump family and former campaign staffers have been under mounting scrutiny in the wake of Donald Trump Jr.'s disclosure that he, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer and a Russian-American lobbyist who Trump Jr. was told would have incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. 
 
 Cobb will work alongside White House counsel Donald McGahn. He'll coordinate with Trump's personal lawyer on Russia matters, Marc Kasowitz. "For weeks," the New York Times reported Friday, McGahn "has been urging Mr. Trump to bolster his in-house team with a seasoned lawyer to help deal with an expected flood of document requests" from Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller. 
 
 "The idea was to have someone who could deal directly with Mr. Trump on the matter and coordinate with his personal lawyer, which would allow Mr. McGahn and the rest of the staff to tend to the day-to-day work of keeping the White House functioning," the Times also reported. 
 
 In addition to Kasowitz, others members on Trump's Russia team outside of the White House include lawyer Jay Sekulow and public relations consultant Mark Corallo. 
 
 Earlier in the week, Trump Jr. hired Alan Futerfas as his personal attorney regarding the Russia investigations. And Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a senior adviser in the White House, shook things up on his team. Abbe Lowell, a criminal defense lawyer, will now be in charge of all matters relating to Kushner and the Russia probes. As a result, Jamie Gorelick will be stepping back from those matters but will continue to work on issues regarding ethics compliance, according to the Times. 
 
 And in case you're wondering, Cobb is related to the Hall of Fame baseball outfielder of the same name. 
 
 The president's decision to bring on Cobb was first reported by Bloomberg News on Friday. ||||| In a tense meeting in early March with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, President Trump’s lawyers insisted he had no obligation to talk with federal investigators probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. 
 
 But Mueller responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter. 
 
 Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer. 
 
 “This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.” 
 
 The flare-up set in motion weeks of turmoil among Trump’s attorneys as they debated how to deal with the special counsel’s request for an interview, a dispute that ultimately led to Dowd’s resignation. 
 
 In the wake of the testy March 5 meeting, Mueller’s team agreed to provide the president’s lawyers with more specific information about the subjects that prosecutors wished to discuss with the president. With those details in hand, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow compiled a list of 49 questions that the team believed the president would be asked, according to three of the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. The New York Times first reported the existence of the list. 
 
 The questions focus on events during the Trump campaign, transition and presidency that have long been known to be under scrutiny, including the president’s reasons for firing then-FBI Director James B. Comey and the pressure he put on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. 
 
 Now Trump’s newly reconfigured legal team is pondering how to address the special counsel’s queries, all while assessing the potential evidence of obstruction that Mueller might present and contending with a client who has grown increasingly opposed to sitting down with the special counsel. Without a resolution on the interview, the standoff could turn into a historic confrontation before the Supreme Court over a presidential subpoena. 
 
 Sekulow and Dowd declined to comment. Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined to comment. 
 
 The president has repeatedly decried the investigation as a “witch hunt.” 
 
 “Oh, I see . . . you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!” Trump tweeted Tuesday. 
 
 Trump’s remade legal team is now led by former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who told The Washington Post on Tuesday that he views Mueller as the utmost professional, but is still reviewing documents and considering conditions he might set before deciding whether to recommend that Trump agree to an interview. 
 
 “Hopefully we’re getting near the end. We all on both sides have some important decisions to make,” Giuliani said. “I still have a totally open mind on what the right strategy is, which we’ll develop in the next few weeks.” 
 
 In the meantime, Trump’s lawyers are also considering whether to provide Mueller with written explanations of the episodes he is examining. After investigators laid out 16 specific subjects they wanted to review with the president and added a few topics within each one, Sekulow broke the queries down into 49 separate questions, according to people familiar with the process. 
 
 Paul Rosenzweig, who worked as a senior counsel on independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation during the Clinton administration, predicted that the president would face a long interview if the special counsel hewed to the list Sekulow compiled. 
 
 “This isn’t a list of 49 questions. It’s 49 topics,” Rosenzweig said. “Each of these topics results in dozens of questions. To be honest, that list is a two-day interview. You don’t get through it in an hour or two.” 
 
 For his part, Trump fumed when he saw the breadth of the questions that emerged out of the talks with Mueller’s team, according to two White House officials. 
 
 The president and several advisers now plan to point to the list as evidence that Mueller has strayed beyond his mandate and is overreaching, they said. 
 
 “He wants to hammer that,” according to a person who spoke to Trump on Monday. 
 
 “Mueller is in Kenny Starr territory now,” said another Trump adviser, referring to how the controversial independent counsel investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s real estate deals in Arkansas ended up examining the president’s lies about his sexual relationship with a White House intern. 
 
 Trump advisers are particularly frustrated by the Mueller team’s focus on whether Trump was obstructing justice by trying to push last summer for Sessions to resign. If the attorney general had stepped down, Trump could have chosen a replacement who was not recused from running the Russia investigation. 
 
 Dowd has repeatedly argued that the president has ultimate authority under the Constitution to fire or demote any of his appointees and that his firing decisions cannot be used as evidence of obstruction. 
 
 The revelation of the scope of the questions before the president’s team could further complicate recently renewed talks between the special counsel and Trump’s attorneys about a possible interview. 
 
 Last week, Giuliani met with Mueller to reopen negotiations over a presidential interview. 
 
 Giuliani conveyed the ongoing resistance of Trump and his advisers to a sit-down but did not rule out the possibility. Still, Trump remains strongly opposed to granting Mueller an interview — resistance fueled largely by the raids last month on the office and residences of his personal attorney Michael Cohen. 
 
 [Giuliani reopens negotiations about presidential interview but cautions special counsel that Trump remains resistant] 
 
 Trump’s anger over the Cohen raids spilled into nearly every conversation in the days that followed and continues to be a sore point for the president. One confidant said Trump seems to “talk about it 20 times a day.” Other associates said they often stay silent, in person or on the phone, as he vents about the Cohen matter, knowing there is little they can say. 
 
 Alan Dershowitz, a well-known lawyer and Trump advocate, said Tuesday that it would be dangerous and unwise for the president to agree to an interview. 
 
 “The strategy is to throw him softballs so that he will go on and on with his answers,” he said. “Instead of sharp questions designed to elicit yes or no, they make him feel very comfortable and let him ramble.” 
 
 In that setting, Dershowitz said, prosecutors could catch Trump in a misstatement. 
 
 Should Mueller seek to compel Trump’s testimony using a subpoena, a legal battle could ensue that could delay the investigation and force the issue into the courts, potentially to the Supreme Court. 
 
 Trump’s team could argue that Mueller was seeking information about the president’s private conversations that are protected by executive privilege or that a grand jury interview would place an unnecessary burden on the president’s ability to run the country. 
 
 Judges have generally held that the president is not above the law and can be subjected to normal legal processes — but the issue of a presidential subpoena for testimony has not been tested in court. Starr subpoenaed President Bill Clinton for grand jury testimony in 1998 but withdrew it after Clinton agreed to testify voluntarily. He was interviewed at the White House, appearing before the grand jury via video. 
 
 Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said judges generally like to accommodate a president because he has to be free to “manage the affairs of the world and deal with nuclear war without having to worry about whether he has to show up for an interview the next day.” 
 
 But, he added, courts are loath to say the president can’t be investigated. 
 
 “The opposite argument is that no man is above the law, and if it’s a lawful investigation, then he must respond,” Rosenzweig said. 
 
 Some legal experts believe that two Justice Department opinions prohibit federal prosecutors, including Mueller, from charging a sitting president with a crime. Instead, they said, the Constitution relies on Congress’s power to impeach as the route to hold a president accountable for potentially criminal behavior. 
 
 Trump’s lawyers could then argue that he cannot be forced to testify under subpoena, unless his testimony is necessary to indict someone else. 
 
 Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
– There's plenty of speculation in DC about whether President Trump might fire special counsel Robert Mueller. But Mike Allen of Axios reports on another strategy being explored by the president's legal team: Appoint a second special counsel to investigate Mueller's investigation. The story suggests that Trump's attorneys trust Mueller himself but not others in the Justice Department. For example, they point to a Fox News story Monday detailing how the wife of a Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr worked for the company behind the infamous anti-Trump dossier that emerged during the election. Ohr was recently demoted for concealing his own meetings with the company, Fusion GPS. "The Department of Justice and FBI cannot ignore the multiple problems that have been created by these obvious conflicts of interests," Trump attorney Jay Sekulow tells Axios. "These new revelations require the appointment of a special counsel to investigate." It's not clear how likely this is to happen, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions has previously floated the idea of a second special counsel to cover a wide range of GOP concerns. Meanwhile, the Washington Post has a profile of Trump's legal trio: Sekulow (the TV presence), Ty Cobb (a White House attorney), and John Dowd (Trump's personal attorney). They "serve not only as Trump's lawyers but also as his strategists, publicists, therapists—and, based on Dowd's claim that he wrote a controversial presidential tweet, ghostwriters," per the Post.