Trump's lawyer denies he's being investigated

President Donald Trump's personal lawyer said on Sunday that Trump is not under investigation in the probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential race, a statement that appeared to contradict a comment Trump himself made on Twitter last week.

That tactic from Trump's lawyers and proxies has manifested itself in aggressively worded statements and television appearances aimed at warding off any legal threat from prosecutors — and persuading the American public the president isn't in legal jeopardy.

The legal team, like the president, has come out ready to hit hard, even if not always quite accurately.

Mr. Sessions, who early on was Mr. Trump's campaign manager for the Republican presidential nomination, told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "I recused myself from any investigation into the campaigns for president, but I did not recuse myself from defending my honor against scurrilous and false allegations". Sekulow said he was actually discussing the "legal theory of how the Constitution works" and that Wallace had rephrased his talking points. (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at Federal Bureau of Investigation.) I did not say I would "let this go". To make it even more hard, their client's public statements often threaten to undercut their work.

Former US attorney Preet Bharara, whom Trump fired in March after Bharara refused to resign along with a raft of other Obama-era Justice Department attorneys, slammed Trump's choice to pick the attorney for his team. Does he believe the president, who says there's no wrongdoing here, or does he go after the president in the way James Comey wants him to do? He says that President Donald Trump, Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and Democratic lawmakers should not be presuming an outcome.

Sekulow also defended Trump's use of social media, saying he does not tell him what to write or not write, after the president last week tweeted that he was under investigation for firing Comey.

Sekulow was referring to a report in the Post this week that said Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in November's presidential election was now also trying to determine whether Trump obstructed justice.

And so, investigators will likely try to determine whether Trump indicated in that meeting that he'd already made his decision, and indicated to them his reason for it, in effect enlisting them in an effort to create a cover story for the firing. In other words, it's going to take more than a couple of memos from James Comey to get Mueller to look seriously at Trump for obstruction of justice. Couldn't you be under investigation and they've just not let you know yet? "But if it's just, he's acting impetuously because he doesn't like having himself or his friends investigated for something he genuinely believes he didn't do, then I think that's a much harder case for obstruction". "The legal team has not been notified of an investigation".

The government's investigation, begun by the FBI last summer, is far from that stage and is still growing.

Whether or not Mueller finds these reports to be valid will be hugely relevant to any finding of obstruction. That may be an understandable approach in such a high-profile matter, though not always an advisable one.

"No answer is probably the most troubling answer in criminal defense", Cohen said.

If it's such an open and shut deal and things are so crystal clear, why does Mueller need an army of lawyers?

"Boring" seems out of the question.

The lawyer also suggested Twitter's character limit may be partly to blame.

Over the weekend, attorney Jay Sekulow appeared on CBS News "Face The Nation" and contradicted that claim.