President Trump’s former personal lawyer John Dowd accused special counsel Robert Mueller of seeking to “smear and damage the reputation of counsel and innocent people” in how he characterized an infamous Dowd voicemail and other conduct in the special counsel report.
Dowd issued the statement Friday after prosecutors filed the full transcript of a voicemail Dowd left for Michael Flynn’s lawyer — a filing made at the request of the judge in Flynn’s case. A partial transcript of the voicemail was previously made public in Mueller’s report, which described it as part of a “sequence of events could have had the potential to affect Flynn’s decision to cooperate, as well as the extent of that cooperation.”
The fuller version makes clear that Dowd was the Trump personal attorney who left the voice mail, though that had already been reported. It was left on Nov. 22, 2017, days before Flynn formally entered his plea deal with Mueller and after Flynn’s lawyers informed the President’s legal team they could no longer have confidential conversations due to Flynn’s cooperation.
Dowd, in his statement Friday, called the obstruction section of Mueller’s report “a baseless, political document designed to smear and damage the reputation of counsel and innocent people.”
He claimed that Mueller “knows and his March 2019 report reflects there was no conflict of interest between counsel for the President and LtGen Flynn involving the matters under investigation as reflected in the unprecedented cooperation by the President with all Special Counsel requests including materials and testimony describing LtGen Flynn and his resignation from office.”
(The President, in fact, did not cooperate with several Mueller requests that he sit down for an interview or answer certain questions in writing.)
“During the joint defense relationship, counsel for the President provided to Flynn’s counsel documents, advice and encouragement to provide to SC as part of his effort to cooperate with SC,” Dowd said in his statement. “SC never raised or questioned the President’s counsel about these allegations despite numerous opportunities to do so.”
Read Dowd’s statement and the court filing with the full transcript of his voicemail below:
