CNN’s Acosta: Mulvaney Needed Outside Counsel — He Is ‘Involved in All of This’

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta said acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has his own lawyer for the House’s impeachment inquiry because he is “involved in all of this.”

Wolf Blitzer asked, “There are reports that Mulvaney was sort of on thin ice as a result of that disastrous press briefing that he gave a couple of weeks ago. Why does he need a private attorney, why isn’t he represented by the White House counsel?”

Acosta said, “Mick Mulvaney is now very essentially, I think, involved in all of this, and Democrats very much want to hear what Mick Mulvaney has to say. Remember what Fiona Hill testified and others have testified throughout this impeachment inquiry, that John Bolton, the National Security Adviser — and remember, much of this weighs on whether John Bolton will be ultimately compelled to testify in this impeachment inquiry — but it was John Bolton, according to Fiona Hill, who said that Mick Mulvaney and Gordon Sondland, the Ambassador to the E.U., were cooking up a ‘drug deal’ with respect to this dirt-for-dollar scheme that was going on inside of the Trump Administration with respect to the president’s phone call with Ukraine.”

He added, “And so there are some far-reaching implications in all of this, and if Mick Mulvaney is implicated in any way in a potential impeachment inquiry, that is why Mick Mulvaney needs outside counsel in addition to the White House counsel weighing in. We saw the same thing playing out during the Russia investigation, when White House officials needed outside counsel.”

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