A former Trump White House lawyer says he thinks there is a “very high” chance that former President Trump will face an indictment.
Ty Cobb, who represented the White House during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign’s contacts with Russia, told CBS News’s “The Takeout” podcast that he believes the former president is likely to face legal consequences for actions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
“I think the president is in serious legal water,” Cobb said in the podcast, released on Friday. “Not so much because of the [Mar-a-Lago] search, but because of the obstructive activity he took in connection with the Jan. 6 proceeding and the attempts to interfere in the election count in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and perhaps Michigan.”
Cobb also told CBS News that he suspects the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago last month — during which the agency says it recovered numerous classified documents — is related to the Justice Department’s larger investigation into Trump’s actions related to the Jan. 6 attack.
“It is about the bigger picture, the Jan. 6 issues, the fake electors, the whole scam with regard to the ‘big lie’ and the attempts to … cling to the presidency in a desperate fashion,” Cobb said.
The former White House lawyer noted that the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago seemed “unusually large and broad” and was “very comprehensive in terms of the types of documents that the government could take.”
The Justice Department and Trump are currently locked in a legal battle over the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, with a judge earlier this week granting Trump’s request for a special master to review the materials recovered during the search. The Justice Department has since appealed that ruling.
A Friday filing also revealed disagreements between the two parties over how a special master should function in the case, including over which documents should be reviewed and whether executive privilege claims should be considered.
That investigation comes as both the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack and a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury is probing Trump’s alleged interference into the 2020 election. The former president is also facing separate investigations involving his businesses and tax returns.