Ty Cobb — no, not that Ty Cobb— isn’t a household name outside of Washington legal circles.
But Cobb, who spent almost a year from July 2017 to May 2018 as the White House lawyer leading the response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, may have, in retrospect, made one of the most consequential decisions in the presidency of Donald Trump: To cooperate fully with Mueller’s investigation.
Cobb’s thinking, according to reporting over the past two years, was that by fully cooperating with Mueller’s investigation, Trump and his broader White House would ensure that the probe was short-lived.
“I’d be embarrassed if this is still haunting the White House by Thanksgiving and worse if it’s still haunting him by year end,” Cobb told Reuters in August 2017(!), adding: “I think the relevant areas of inquiry by the special counsel are narrow.”
To that end, Cobb urged Trump not to publicly attack Mueller — the former director of the FBI — or the special counsel probe more broadly. And most importantly, Cobb advised Trump to allow administration officials to broadly cooperate with asks from the special counsel.
“I was the one that advised it,” Cobb acknowledged in an interview this week with ABC News of the open-book approach to Mueller. “But the President did make the decision.”
One critical example of why Cobb’s advice — and Trump’s initial decision to listen to it — mattered so much: White House counsel Donald McGahn spent more than 30 hours in conversations with the special counsel’s office in which he shared “detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise,” according to The New York Times, whichbroke the McGahn story back in August 2018.
That same story included these critical lines:
“Mr. McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Mr. Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mr. Mueller. The president’s lawyers have explained that they believed their client had nothing to hide and that they could bring the investigation to an end quickly.”
Obviously, Cobb’s theory of the case didn’t come to pass.
Mueller’s probe, which began in May 2017, is still ongoing — althoughrecent reports suggest it is nearing an end. Trump’s frustration with Cobb’s go-along-to-get-along-approach led to thelawyer’s departure from the White House in May 2018— and to the installation of a much more aggressive legal team led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has spent the past 10 months savaging Mueller and the investigation more generally.
“A source familiar with Cobb’s departure said the former federal prosecutor, who joined Trump’s legal team in July 2017, had been clashing with the President in recent weeks over Trump’s combative posture with the special counsel’s investigation. Trump has intensified his public attacks on Robert Mueller’s probe in recent weeks, and on Wednesday, suggested that questions by Mueller’s team about whether he obstructed justice amount to a ‘setup & trap.'”
By the time Cobb left the White House, however, the die was cast. The White House had spent the better part of a year cooperating fully with Mueller’s probe. Critically, that cooperation came in the first year of Mueller’s investigation — when his team, presumably, were in an information-gathering and dot-connecting mode. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. And through Cobb’s policy of full cooperation, Mueller’s team was able to not only gather scads of information but also begin to put the pieces in place for a much broader investigation that now deals not only with Russian’s interference in the 2016 election but also potential obstruction of justice by the President.
Without that initial suggestion by Cobb — and Trump’s decision to acquiesce to it — it’s uniquely possible we could be talking about a different, and maybe significantly narrower, special counsel investigation. Of course, hindsight is 20/20.
And neither Trump nor his White House have the luxury of going back in time right about now.
