Watergate prosecutor: The GOP needs 'better lawyers' to defend Trump before impeachment hits the senate

Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks explained during an MSNBC appearance Thursday that the Republicans should consider looking for better representation as impeachment gears up.

While President Donald Trump has committed himself to a lawyer who tends to butt-dial reporters, Wine-Banks encouraged the GOP to hire someone respectable.

"Well, so far, I would say, they need better lawyers," she began in her conversation with Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle. "Because they haven’t had what I would consider to be an effective strategy. They’ve started with the 'It’s a bad process' -- the process argument is completely gone. And by the way, it was never a bad process. It is what the Constitution provides right now."

Ruhle noted that Trump had a strange legal team during Robert Mueller's investigation, as well as Attorney General Bill Barr, and it worked for him.

"But that wasn’t his legal team that did it," she said. "It was how the report was written and it was how it was presented through the Judiciary Committee, through the mouth of Mueller, who stuck to a very arcane use of language, very stilted and very controlled," Wine-Banks continued. "And so you didn’t get the full picture. The Ukraine -- the whole situation has captured the imagination of America. People get a shakedown when they see it. It’s no longer just a question of, well, did he or didn’t he do something? And he didn’t do it directly, but it was people who worked for him. Now they’re seeing the president release a memo of a conversation that says, 'But I need a favor, though.' And it’s right there in public. So I think it’s really so clear that what he did is his voice, he did it."

She also agreed that Barr seems like he's joined the president's legal team.

Watch the full conversation below: