A former Trump legal team spokesman has reportedly hired a pair of Washington, D.C.-based lawyers after he was tied in a new book to the creation of a misleading statement about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign leaders and Russian officials.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman who was once offered the job of communications director, has hired the husband-wife legal team of Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova after he was named in Michael Wolff’s bestselling “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Politico reported Friday.
Corallo was the spokesperson for President Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. He resigned in July.
{mosads}Corallo hired the attorneys because he expects to be summoned for interviews by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and congressional investigators as part of the probes into Russian election interference, according to Politico.
In the book, Wolff states that the former spokesman quit after helping Trump to write a misleading statement about Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who he’d been told could offer dirt on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer the phone,” Wolff wrote. “Later that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome — and privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice — quit.”
The original statement released by the White House that Trump Jr. met with the Russian lawyer solely to discuss adoption policies, although that was later disputed by emails sent ahead of the rendezvous.
The White House confirmed that Trump weighed in on the statement “as any father would.”