Jeff Sessions

President Donald Trump believes Attorney General Jeff Sessions will likely leave his Cabinet at the end of the year, and so far has five potential replacements in mind who could take his place, reports Business Insider.

“Possible successors include retired federal appeals judge Janice Rogers Brown, transportation department counsel Steven Bradbury, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar, deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, and Bill Barr, who served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush,” according to the article, based on a Wall Street Journal report.

The Washington Post also reported that President Trump talked recently with Sessions’ own chief of staff, Matthew G. Whitaker,  about replacing Sessions as AG, according to people briefed on the conversation, signaling that the president remains keenly interested in ousting his top law enforcement official.

Read the Business Insider article.

Image by Mike Mozart

AT&T’s chief executive said Friday that the company made a “serious misjudgment” to seek advice from President Trump’s personal attorney and announced that its top lobbying executive in Washington would be leaving the firm, reports The Washington Post.

AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson wrote in a companywide internal email that hiring Cohen “was a big mistake.”

AT&T agreed to pay $600,000 to Cohen last year in exchange for advice on dealing with the Trump administration. Internal AT&T documents outlined how Cohen was expected to provide guidance on matters facing the company at the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department, specifically mentioning AT&T’s $85 billion Time Warner merger, according to reporter Brian Fung.

The executive who is leaving is Bob Quinn, AT&T’s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs.

Read the Post article.

The FBI’s top lawyer, James Baker, is being reassigned — one of the first moves by new director Christopher A. Wray to assemble his own team of senior advisers as he tries to fend off accusations of politicization within the bureau, reports The Washington Post.

Reporters Devlin Barrett, Ellen Nakashima and Carol Leonnig write:

Baker told colleagues he will be taking on other duties at the FBI, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent months, Baker had been caught up in a strange interagency dispute that led to a leak probe and attracted the attention of senior lawmakers, but people familiar with the matter said the probe had recently ended with a decision not to charge anyone. The leak issue had not played a part in Baker’s reassignment, these people said.

The report says Baker was close to former FBI director James B. Comey, who asked Baker to be his general counsel.

Read the Post article.

As lawyers for the world’s highest-profile client, John M. Dowd and Ty Cobb have come under scrutiny for their every move and utterance — and the criticism has been harsh, according to a report The Washington Post published on President Trump’s legal team’s representation in the Russia probe.

The report says that, when the president “frets that Mueller may be getting too close to him, they assure him he has done nothing wrong, urge him to resist attacking the special counsel and insist that the investigation is wrapping up — first, they said, by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas and now by early next year.”

The team is derided by some as being indiscreet, error-prone and outmatched, write Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman.

They quote Alan Dershowitz, a criminal defense attorney and Harvard Law School professor: “These are not the kinds of things that one would expect from the most powerful man in America, who has a choice of anybody to be his defense counsel. Well — almost anybody.”

Read the Post‘s article.

Lawsuits against President Trump for alleged violations of the foreign emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution could result in the pretrial production of his personal tax returns, explains Paul Barrett for Bloomberg Businessweek.

“The plaintiffs say one of their first steps will be to demand, via pretrial discovery, copies of Trump’s elusive personal tax filings,” Barrett writes. “How better to assess the scope of the president’s international business affairs—and perhaps to discover why he has hidden his returns so defiantly?”

Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business empire led to the suits, partly based on the use of Trump International Hotel in Washington by representatives of the governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Georgia.

Read the Bloomberg article.