text: President Trump's legal team believes Attorney General Jeff Session's Justice Department and the FBI — more than special counsel Robert Mueller himself — are to blame for what they see as a witch hunt. 
   
   The result: They want an additional special counsel named to investigate the investigators. 
   
   Trump officials outlined their new line of thinking to me last night. ||||| 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. ||||| EXCLUSIVE: A senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump “dossier” had even closer ties to Fusion GPS, the firm responsible for the incendiary document, than have been disclosed, Fox News has confirmed: The official’s wife worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election. 
   
   Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016. 
   
   Fusion GPS has attracted scrutiny because Republican lawmakers have spent the better part of this year investigating whether the dossier, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the basis for the Justice Department and the FBI to obtain FISA surveillance last year on a Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page. 
   
   “The House Intelligence Committee,” Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News in a statement on Monday, “is looking into all facets of the connections between the Department of Justice and Fusion GPS, including Mr. Ohr.” 
   
   Until Dec. 6, when Fox News began making inquiries about him, Bruce Ohr held two titles at DOJ. He was, and remains, director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force; but his other job was far more senior. Mr. Ohr held the rank of associate deputy attorney general, a post that gave him an office four doors down from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The day before Fox News reported that Mr. Ohr held his secret meetings last year with the founder of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, and with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier, the Justice Department stripped Ohr of his deputy title and ousted him from his fourth floor office at the building that DOJ insiders call “Main Justice.” 
   
   The Department of Justice has provided no public explanation for Ohr’s demotion. Officials inside the Department have told Fox News his wearing of two hats was “unusual,” but also confirm Ohr had withheld his contacts with the Fusion GPS men from colleagues at the DOJ. 
   
   Former FBI Director James Comey has described the dossier as a compendium of “salacious and unverified” allegations about then-candidate Donald Trump and his associates, including Page, a foreign policy adviser. The dossier was provided to the FBI in July 2016, shortly before then-candidate Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination. As Comey later testified, it was in that same month that the FBI began a counterintelligence probe of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. 
   
   The disclosure by Fox News that Bruce Ohr met with Simpson and Steele last year expanded the reach of the dossier’s creators from the FBI into the top echelons of the Justice Department. Initial investigation suggested that Steele, a longtime FBI informant whose contacts with Mr. Ohr are said to date back a decade, might have played the central role in putting Simpson together with the associate deputy attorney general. Now, the revelation that Mrs. Ohr worked for Simpson calls that account into question. 
   
   A review of open source materials shows Mrs. Ohr was described as a Russia expert at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, when she worked there, briefly, a decade ago. The Center’s website said her project focused on the experiences of Russian farmers during Stalin’s collectivization program and following the invasion of Russia by Nazi forces in 1941. She has also reviewed a number of books about twentieth century Russia, including Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in Soviet Russia (2000), by Gerald Easter, a political scientist at Boston College, and Bertrand M. Patenaude’s The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (2002). 
   
   Contacted by Fox News late Monday, DOJ officials declined to comment. 
   
   Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, declined to comment on the original disclosure about Mr. Ohr’s secret meetings, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mrs. Ohr. 
   
   While Nunes has issued numerous subpoenas to DOJ and FBI relating to the dossier, and has threatened contempt-of-Congress citations against Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray for what congressional Republicans have termed “stonewalling” by the two agencies, Schiff has mostly objected to the demands for documents and witnesses, casting the entire dossier probe as innately political. “I think there's a hope that if they can impeach Christopher Steele, and they can impeach the FBI and DOJ, maybe they can impeach the whole Russia investigation,” Schiff told MSNBC in September. 
   
   James Rosen joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in 1999 and is the network’s chief Washington correspondent.
target: – 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.