Former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File
The chances of Donald Trump getting indicted are “very high,” a former White House lawyer said.
“I think the president is in serious legal water,” former White House lawyer Ty Cobb told CBS News.
Earlier this year, an ex-prosecutor also said he believes that testimony from Capitol rioters will eventually culminate in a devastating blow to Trump.
President Donald Trump’s former White House lawyer said there’s a “very high” chance that the ex-president will face an indictment in relation to the January 6 Capitol riot.
Former White House lawyer Ty Cobb made the assertion during an interview with CBS News’ Major Garrett, released Friday.
“I think the president is in serious legal water,” Cobb said. “Not so much because of the [Mar-a-Lago] search, but because of the obstructive activity he took in connection with the January 6 proceeding and the attempts to interfere in the election count in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and perhaps Michigan.”
Last month, the FBI recovered several boxes containing classified records that Trump took with him from the White House once he left office, according to the court records made public. The search unearthed more than two dozen boxes containing some “11,000 documents and 1,800 other items from the office and storage room,” according to court filings. Some of the boxes were distinctly marked as “top secret,” Insider’s Sonam Sheth reported.
Some of those materials include private and potentially sensitive documents like medical, tax, and accounting records, the court said. Under the Presidential Records Act, presidential records must be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration upon leaving office.
The Justice Department is now investigating whether Trump violated any laws pertaining to the handling of government documents.
But Cobb in the interview said he believes the FBI’s search is linked to a broader investigation into Trump’s role in the Capitol riot, which lawmakers have scrutinized for months.
“It is about the bigger picture, the January 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 Capitol riot left five people, including one police officer, dead. Members of the Proud Boys, which is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, were also present.
The House committee investigating the riot held public hearings earlier this year, which included testimony from various former Trump administration aides — creating a clearer timeline of the president’s actions before and after the riot.
Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a close aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, disclosed a number of shocking revelations, including that Trump knew some of his loyalists gathered in Washington were armed, the president supposedly lunged at his driver in order to take control of a Secret Service vehicle, and when hearing rioters chanting that Vice President Mike Pence should be hanged, the president said he “deserves” it.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who emerged as a star witness during the hearings, testified in a recorded deposition that dealing with Trump’s claims of election fraud were like “playing Whac-a-Mole” and that the allegations were “bogus.”
“Not only did President Trump refuse to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, he placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended,” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the panel’s vice-chair, said at the hearing.