Trump Lawyer Says Special Counsel Inquiry Should Be Ended

WASHINGTON — A lawyer for President Trump said on Saturday that Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who is overseeing the special counsel’s investigation into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s campaign, should end the inquiry.

The remark represented an extraordinary shift in the public strategy by the Trump legal team. For months, Mr. Trump’s advisers have urged the president to avoid any criticism of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the president’s lawyers had done nothing publicly that could agitate Mr. Mueller’s team.

The Trump lawyer, John Dowd, made the statement to The Daily Beast a day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired the deputy F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, who was among the first officials at the bureau to scrutinize the possible links between Russia and the Trump team.

“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the F.B.I. Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier,” Mr. Dowd said in his statement.

Mr. Dowd said he was speaking on behalf of the president. But in a subsequent statement issued on Saturday morning by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Mr. Dowd backtracked, saying that he had been “speaking for myself, not the president.”

Attempts to reach Mr. Dowd were unsuccessful.

In his statement to The Daily Beast, Mr. Dowd did not specifically mention Mr. Mueller. But the implication that he believed that he should be fired was unmistakable. Such a move would put intense pressure on Republicans in Congress to open an investigation into the action.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have worked to keep him from firing Mr. Mueller in the past. In June, the president ordered Mr. Mueller fired but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive, according to four people told of the matter.

The president has faced a series of revelations this past week about the investigation, and one person close to the White House said the president was livid over a report in The New York Times that Mr. Mueller had subpoenaed his corporate records, including those related to Russia.

Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times in July that the special counsel would be crossing a red line if he looked into his family’s finances beyond any relationship with Russia. But his lawyers privately tried to play down the subpoena, in part to keep the president and his family calm.

Mr. Dowd has been at the center of a string of embarrassing incidents in recent months. In December, he said he had written a tweet, posted by the president, that implied Mr. Trump knew that the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, had lied to the F.B.I. when Mr. Trump fired him.

In September, Mr. Dowd was overheard by a Times reporter discussing details of a dispute inside the president’s legal team over lunch at a popular Washington steakhouse.

Mr. Trump has a long history of using advisers to publicly float a message, giving himself some distance from it. Mr. Dowd was the first Trump lawyer to publicly suggest that the Russia inquiry had no merit.

Mr. Dowd’s statement was immediately criticized by Democrats. “Mr. Dowd’s comments are yet another indication that the first instinct of @realDonaldTrump and his legal team is not to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller, but to undermine him at every turn,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate Democrat, said in a tweet.

“The president, the administration, and his legal team must not take any steps to curtail, interfere with, or end the special counsel’s investigation or there will be severe consequences from both Democrats and Republicans,” he added.