So far, that’s not going too well. Sekulow made the rounds on all the Sunday talk shows (a feat known as the “full Ginsburg” after Monica Lewinsky’s attorney, William Ginsburg, who hit all the shows in one famous blitz at the height of the scandal involving her.) He insisted to anyone who would listen that despite the president’s tweeting that he was under investigation, he was really responding only to the news report and isn’t under investigation at all.

It didn’t make much sense, but Sekulow sounded highly confident in his assertion until he came to his home network, Fox News, to appear on Chris Wallace’s show. That’s when things fell apart. Wallace asked why, if the president isn’t under investigation, he would go after Rosenstein, describing the situation as a “witch hunt.” Sekulow lost his poise and began explaining that Trump had taken the advice of the attorney general and his deputy and “now the Department of Justice is investigating him.”

Wallace called him on it, and they had a spirited back and forth during which Wallace insisted that Sekulow had said what we’d just heard him say:

Chris Wallace: Well, but you don’t know that he isn’t under investigation now, do you?

Jay Sekulow: Well, no one’s notified us that he is. So I — I can’t read people’s minds, but I can tell you this: We have not been notified that there’s an investigation to the president of the United States. So that — nothing has changed in that regard since James Comey’s testimony.

Wallace: Well, you don’t know that he’s not under investigation again, sir. I mean you might —

Sekulow: You know, I can’t read the mind — you’re right, Chris, I can’t read the minds of the special prosecutor.

Wallace ended the segment with “You don’t know. Oh boy, this is weird. You just told us that you didn’t know.”

You can see the whole exchange as captured below:

Wallace: You've now said he' is being investigated after saying he wasn't.
Sekulow: No.
Wallace: You JUST said he's being investigated. pic.twitter.com/KCXULFEXqM

— David Mack (@davidmackau) June 18, 2017

It’s not all that surprising that Trump would end up with a lawyer like Sekulow. But why is Sekulow doing this for Trump? He’s a religious-right guy and while he undoubtedly voted for Trump, as did millions of other conservative Christians, the president seems an odd cause for him to take up. But they may have more in common than seems obvious at first blush.

According to Right Wing Watch, which has been tracking Sekulow for years, they have a similar approach to making money:

Several years ago, Tony Mauro wrote an article for The Legal Times entitled “The Secrets of Jay Sekulow” which examined how “through the ACLJ and a string of interconnected nonprofit and for-profit entities, [Sekulow] has built a financial empire that generates millions of dollars a year and supports a lavish lifestyle — complete with multiple homes, chauffeur-driven cars, and a private jet that he once used to ferry Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.”

Sekulow runs two multimillion-dollar nonprofits, the Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism and the American Center for Law and Justice. His wife, brother, sister-in-law and two sons dominate the boards of both organizations, collecting millions of dollars through complicated legal structures.

It’s a highly lucrative nepotistic empire, not unlike the Trump Organization and the current White House. These two men sell different products, but they are cut from the same cloth.