Lawyer Ty Cobb is leaving President Trump’s in-house legal team in the special counsel probe, to be replaced by former Clinton impeachment attorney Emmet Flood.
The White House confirmed the moves Wednesday.
“Emmet Flood will be joining the White House Staff to represent the president and the administration against the Russia witch hunt,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “Ty Cobb, a friend of the president, who has done a terrific job, will be retiring at the end of the month.”
She said Mr. Cobb has been discussing his retirement and let Chief of Staff John F. Kelly know last week that he would leave by June 1.
The New York Times reported that Mr. Flood is expected to take a more adversarial approach to the investigation than Mr. Cobb, who had pushed Mr. Trump as in-house counsel for a more cooperative strategy.
Mr. Flood’s law firm, Williams and Connolly, represents Hillary Clinton, including in the 2016 email scandal, a possible reason that the firm turned down representing Mr. Trump as outside counsel last year in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
A former law clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Mr. Flood advised President Bill Clinton in impeachment proceedings in the late 1990s.
He also served two years in the White House Counsel’s office under President George W. Bush.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst, called Mr. Flood ” a top-shelf, A-plus, top-of-the-line, nothing short of brilliant litigator.”
“This also tells me that the president finally recognizes how serious the Mueller probe is,” Mr. Napolitano said. “He finally is moving in the direction of Rudy Giuliani to head the outside team and Emmet Flood to head the inside team.”
He added, “This is very late in the game for a change of this magnitude. There is no one on the president’s team who has been there since Day One.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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