Politics
- Lawyer Ted Olson has publicly repudiated President Donald Trump twice over the past two weeks and has turned down his offer to work on his legal team.
- Olson called Trump's White House chaotic, and had previously rebuked him for siding with a New York court on a terrorism law.
- Olson is the latest lawyer to refuse to join Trump's legal team in the Russia investigation.
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A top lawyer from the Bush administration who rejected President Donald Trump's offer to join his legal team has now publicly criticized his White House in a stunning rebuke of the administration's stability, according to The Washington Post.
Ted Olson, who served as former President George W. Bush's solicitor general and represented him in the landmark Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case in 2000 that handed Bush the presidency, slammed the White House's frequent personnel changes.
"I think everybody would agree: This is turmoil, it's chaos, it's confusion, it's not good for anything," Olson said Monday on MSNBC. "We always believe that there should be an orderly process, and, of course, government is not clean or orderly ever. But this seems to be beyond normal."
Last week, a colleague of Olson's stated in a tweet that Olson and another lawyer at this law firm, Gibson Dunn, would not be joining Trump's legal team.
"I can confirm that @gibsondunn and Theodore B. Olson will not be representing @realDonaldTrump," lawyer Ted Boutrous wrote.
This is not the first time Olson has publicly called Trump out. Olson wrote an op-ed for Fox News around the time he was being recruited by Trump in which he blasted the president for siding with a New York court in allegedly undermining the Anti-Terrorism Act, which he called "one of America's most important counter-terrorism laws."
Olson is one of several lawyers Trump has tried to tap to join his legal team as part of a wide-ranging shakeup as the president prepares for a potential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller as part of the Russia investigation.
One of Trump's top lawyers defending him in the case, John Dowd, resigned from his team last week because he said Trump was refusing to listen to his advice. Dowd had come under fire earlier this month for suggesting that the Mueller probe should end, and later retracted his statements and called them only his own. Two other lawyers Trump had hoped to hire, Joseph diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, also apparently backed out over the weekend. Toensing is reportedly representing another Mueller witness, Mark Corallo.