THE SHALLOW END:

At the very moment when Robert Mueller's Russia investigation is spinning into higher gear, Donald Trump's legal team is falling apart in extraordinary fashion. John Dowd, the president's lead personal lawyer, resigned last week. Ty Cobb, who is running point for the White House on everything Russia, is on the outs. Even Joseph diGenova, the shit-kicking conspiracy theorist who was expected to join the team, unexpectedly bowed out Sunday, alongside his wife, Fox News regular Victoria Toensing, citing undefined conflicts. (The New York Times reported that Trump did not believe he had "personal chemistry" with the couple.) "I don't think you have seen anything like this," said former Obama general counsel Bob Bauer, struggling to identify a historical antecedent. "Like so much else around Trump, [the shake-up] is marked by confusion, a lack of consistency, and an apparent reflection of the president's uncontrolled impulses."

Trump's personal legal team now consists of just one full-time attorney--Jay Sekulow--a remarkably shallow bench for a president facing potential obstruction of justice charges and the prospect of impeachment. "As far as I can tell, Ty Cobb is the only attorney left on the Trump team with experience handling federal criminal investigations," said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who has been closely following the probe. "The team is thinner than you might expect for perhaps the most important investigation of our lifetime."

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