"Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case...don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on."

"Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted. Problem is that a new...... ....lawyer or law firm will take months to get up to speed (if for no other reason than they can bill more), which is unfair to our great country - and I am very happy with my existing team. Besides, there was NO COLLUSION with Russia, except by Crooked Hillary and the Dems!"

Trump tweets this morning, here and here — as we're hearing the news (NYT) that Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing will not be joining Trump's special counsel legal team.

That one sentence — "Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted" — makes it sound as though he knows he needs to take a legal position that challenges the limits of professional ethics! How is that smart? Whether it's true or not, why say that? Lawyers are just a bunch of money-grubbing fame-seekers! Why say that when he's going to need us to credit his lawyers? Is there some secret "genius" reason? Like... he's really casting aspersions on the lawyers who are out to get him, Mueller and company?

ADDED: I guess Trump wrote "some are conflicted" because, according to Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, quoted at the NYT link, they had "conflicts" that "prevent" them from "joining the president’s special counsel legal team." But why did he write "some [lawyers] are conflicted" instead of something more like "some lawyers have conflicts" or, better "some lawyers have conflicts of interest." To my ear, the locution to be conflicted connotes a struggle within the individual, drawn in 2 directions by competing concerns — such as, on one side, a desire for fame and money and on the other side ethical objections. The way Trump wrote, it sounds as though lawyers are feeling ambivalent about working for him, not that they have clients or business interests that present a conflict of interest.

"Deep state."

I'm noticing:

"Trump just hired a deep-state conspiracy theorist as his lawyer. Here’s what Joe diGenova has said" (WaPo): "Genova... told Fox News Channel in January that the [Mueller] investigation is 'a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime. Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.'" Much more at the link.

And:

"The Monmouth University Poll... finds a large bipartisan majority who feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a 'Deep State' of unelected government officials.... Few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term 'Deep State;' another 24% are somewhat familiar, while 63% say they are not familiar with this term. However, when the term is described as a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, nearly 3-in-4 (74%) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington...."

That is, the Washington Post is trying to delegitimatize diGenova by pinning a term on him that people might not understand, but that, if they did come to understand, would probably cause them to support diGenova. So not only does WaPo not hurt diGenova (and Trump), as intended, it gives higher profile to a relatively unknown term that has the power to sharpen awareness and concern about the very problem that diGenova is trying to warn us about, and we can see from the Monmouth poll that people are very receptive to that warning.

ALSO: Another term in play there is "conspiracy theorist." If we're going to throw that term around, isn't diGenova's "conspiracy theory" a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory (the theory that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians)?