MSNBC's Rachel Maddow explains why Trump hired two no-name lawyers — and it has nothing to do with Russia

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Thursday night threaded the needle between the quiet announcement of President Donald Trump's two new no-name lawyers that accompanied his hiring of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani and the government's case against his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Trump hired husband-and-wife lawyers Martin and Jane Raskin, a legal duo based out of a tiny Miami suburb, after meeting with the pair at Mar-a-Lago.

"Because their hiring was announced at the same time as Mr. Giuliani's hiring," Maddow noted, "it was assumed that they too were hired to represent the president in the Russia investigation."

As she pointed out, however, that doesn't appear to be the case. Instead, as the Post reported, they're also figuring out "attorney-client protections to keep investigators from scouring Trump’s communications with his personal lawyer."

"They weren't just hired for [the investigation led by special counsel Robert] Mueller, which is what we had previously thought," Maddow said. "That's supporting evidence for what The New York Times has been reporting about how clear and present the president feels the danger is from the Michael Cohen case. He's hiring new lawyers and putting them on that."

Their hiring, paired with an analyses of the president's initial response to Cohen's raid earlier in April, offers "overwhelming evidence" of the president's defense in his longtime lawyer's case, Maddow said.

"From the very beginning," the host noted, Trump has opined about attorney-client privilege in the wake of his lawyer's raid. On April 10, the day after Cohen's residences and office were searched by federal investigators, he tweeted that "attorney-client privilege is dead."

In his outlandish Fox & Friends interview earlier on Thursday, however, he insisted that despite Cohen working for him for over a decade, their business relationship makes up a "tiny, tiny percentage" of his legal representation — an admission prosecutors used in a filing hours later to prove Cohen and the president's communications are not privileged and therefore subject to search.

"The president shredded his own legal case in this tv interview claiming that Michael Cohen does almost no legal work for him at all," Maddow said gleefully.

Watch below, via MSNBC.

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