Thread by @SethAbramson

I'm feeling vindication. One of the most widely shared hitpieces about me was in SLATE, where a guy disassembled a tweet of mine on John Dowd. It was one of many tweets saying, hey, I'm a lawyer, and Dowd is acting crooked. Now—18 months later—well... Dowd is shown to be crooked.

1/ We all know these are bad times for journalism. One type of bad I've experienced over and over is young dudes without law degrees writing stories about my legal analysis and never noting I'm a lawyer—so that them critiquing me won't seem asinine. But then I end up being right.

2/ I practiced in Massachusetts (1999-2001) and New Hampshire (2001-2007) without a single professional conduct complaint. Like most attorneys, I can spot an attorney who is acting improperly. Trump's attorneys—almost to a man—have acted in ways attorneys aren't supposed to act.

3/ So now we have Giuliani lying about both law and facts, inadvertently throwing his client under the bus, trying to collude with other nations. We have Sekulow, per Cohen, doctoring Cohen's statement to Congress. We have Dowd aiding one of Trump's obstruction/tampering gambits.

4/ I've always said folks should read *many* lawyers' words. I'm honored if I'm one, but on (rare) occasion other lawyers and I disagree—and I'm glad you get to see that and are generally checking out other lawyers' views. But nonlawyer hitpieces on a lawyer's legal analysis? No.

5/ If you know a witness is in a federal cooperation agreement, you don't solicit them to give you intel on bogus "national security" grounds—and you don't try to entice them to share intel with you by reminding them that someone who could pardon them still thinks highly of them.

SOURCE/ I find this voicemail objectionable, and so did the attorneys in the Office of the Special Counsel (and yes—I still find objectionable Dowd claiming that he wrote a tweet Trump wrote in order to hide the fact that Trump had just confessed inculpatory evidence on Twitter):

NOTE/ The "first thing" Dowd speaks of is Flynn—like Manafort—secretly joining a joint defense agreement with Trump while he's in a federal cooperation deal. So at the end, when he connects Trump having good feelings for Flynn to the "former" issue, that's what he's referring to.

NOTE2/ In other words, this call to Flynn is part of a pattern of behavior that worked with Manafort—as the Mueller Report details. Trump's lawyers asked witnesses to stay in a joint defense agreement with him post-cooperation—with the euphemistic enticement of a possible pardon.