Confirming CNN report that Bowers and Barbier, two SC lawyers hired with fanfare, are no longer on his team. A person familiar with the situation called it a "mutual" decision.
Bowers has been noticeably muted for someone leading a Trump defense, choosing not to talk to most reporters. The person familiar with the situation said there was no chemistry between Bowers and Trump.
Josh Howard, an NC-based lawyer who had been reported as joining the effort but who was never confirmed by Trump advisers publicly, is also not on the team, per a second person familiar with the situation. Unclear who is on the team.
Lots of reporters tried to talk to Birx while she was there. She was not interested. And when she spoke publicly early on, she appeared in lockstep with a president whose questioning of the science was true beginning in March 2020.
Given the rationales defenders of Birx and Fauci offered for their public statements being that they thought it was better for them to stay inside the government, it would be good for an interviewer to ask them what are concrete examples where their staying made a difference.
Trump is facing a second impeachment but doesn't have a leg affairs director whipping senate votes for him/anyone on his final WH staff w strong senate GOP ties. So he is making feints about primarying people but with no actual apparatus to scare folks with right now.
Instead he's mentioned to a very few advisers - meaning almost none of them - the notion of creating a third party, which he told advisers couldn't help win a presidential race in 2000 when he didn't seek the Reform Party line.
"He's golfing," said one adviser when I asked how rigorously he's focused at the moment on candidate recruitment against the 10 House GOPers who went against him.
The list includes L'il Wayne, who Kushner is said to have pushed for, but does not include Trump family members, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani or Trump himself (this could all change but isn't likely to) nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/…
There have been days of meetings about the pardons, with the president beginning to call people on Sunday to tell them they were getting them. Kushner has focused on a group of people working with Alice Johnson. Ivanka Trump has weighed in. nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/…
The president has continued to tell advisers and allies he really won the election, with less than 48 hours to go before he leaves office. On the current GOP rift, the president's anger is with every Republican who voted for impeachment but singular for McCarthy, aides say.
Associates who've spoken with Trump say he's used the same vulgarity he used about Pence to describe McCarthy, saying he bowed to pressure with his House floor speech.
McCarthy did NOT support impeachment, but that’s hasn’t mattered to the president, according to people who spoke with him.
I got a bit more information about the Lindell meeting. It was a brief meeting, Trump sent him upstairs to the WH counsel's office to be escorted by an admin official sitting next to Lindell in the meeting. That official, according to another official, was Robert O'Brien.
Once up there, he insisted on meeting with Cipollone. It got contentious, in part bc supposedly on the blacked-out part of his notes was something about how Cipollone should be fired.
Lindell tells me that he was carrying the notes for an attorney he's been working with to prove the election was really won by Trump, wouldn't say who it was. Said some of it related to reports Trump is now unable to see because he doesn't have Twitter.