Welker. White house reporter ashley parker. New york times politics reporter jeremy peters. Nbc National Security and justice reporter, julia ainslie. And michael schmidt. Kristen welker, start with the news of john dowds departure. You spoke with imhad just moments ago. Give us a sense of why now and whats sense this sort of change in strategy within the president s legal team . Peter, we have confirmed this report broken by the New York Times. I spoke to john dowd very briefly. He confirmed he resigned. When i asked him why he wouldnt give any details. He said just tell people i love the president and wish him very well. Now of course, this move comes, peter, after all of the shakeup that you just mapped out and also after that weekend statement by john dowd in which he effectively called for the special counsel investigation to end. A lot of people say that was a green light for the president to go on the attack against the special counsel. So we saw all of these tweets. The preside
Difficult for john dowd to maintain the same sort of relationship that he has had with the president. For the last nine or ten months. So dowd decided it was time to resign. Quite a strain, taking the role of the lead outside attorney. I dont know how much that might have played into it. Dowd has decided that he is not going to be with the president s legal team any more. Leaves him with two attorneys on the outside. Joe de genova along with jay seculow, a familiar face on fox news. Those two are now taking the helm. The outside counsel for the president , there are plans to bring more attorneys on to bolster that team as well. As the mueller investigation, harris, approaches a critical phase, that may include an interview of the president by Robert Mueller. John dowd was very much in opposition to that idea. Didnt see a real reason for it. Particularly with the tense upon tens of thousands of pages of documents, emails, other materials that he and ty cobb had been producing to the mue