On August 1, Cobb authorized the Justice Department to give Mueller’s team the draft of Trump’s letter to fire Comey. Trump lawyers had reviewed four drafts of the termination letter, including the final version that Keith Schiller—“the Manila Killa,” as one adviser called him—carried in a manila envelope to FBI headquarters. They felt that the letter exonerated Trump of obstructing justice because they believed it showed he was firing Comey for declining to state publicly that the president was not under investigation, not because of corrupt intent to end the Russia probe.
