Ex-Trump aide wavers on testifying

WASHINGTON — Former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg publicly defied the Justice Department special counsel on Monday, announcing in a series of interviews that he had been subpoenaed to appear in front of a federal grand jury investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election but that he would refuse to go. He later appeared to change his mind.

“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg told The Washington Post in his first stop on a media blitz, saying he does not plan to comply with a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller to hand over emails and other documents related to President Donald Trump and nine other current or former Trump advisers.

Later Monday, though, he told The Associated Press that he would probably cooperate in the end. “I’m going to end up cooperating with them,” he said.

It was a reversal from his tone throughout the day, when he lashed out at Trump and his campaign and threatened to defy Mueller in a series of interviews.

Nunberg seized the national media spotlight for much of Monday afternoon to denounce Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt” and to detail what he said he had learned about the probe from his private interview last month with Mueller’s team. Nunberg advised Trump in the run-up to the campaign but was fired in 2015.

“They want me in there for grand jury on Friday. I’m not paying the money to go down there,” Nunberg told Bloomberg News. “What’s he going to do? He’s so tough — let’s see what they do.”

Nunberg said repeatedly that he believes Mueller is trying to build a case that Trump was “the Manchurian candidate.” He said he suspects Mueller has concluded that Trump “may have done something” based on the questions he was asked by the special counsel’s team.

The line of questioning, Nunberg told MSNBC anchor Katy Tur, “insinuated to me that [Trump] may have done something, and he may very well have.” He added, “Trump may have very well done something during the election. I don’t know what it is. I could be wrong, by the way.”

He also said the president probably knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump’s top campaign staff and a team of Russians.

Shortly after he lobbed that allegation, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders rebuffed him during the White House press briefing.

“I definitely think he doesn’t know that for sure because he’s incorrect,” she said.

Nunberg said the special counsel had sought to persuade him to testify against another former Trump adviser, Roger Stone, for colluding with Russians, but he said he would not because Stone has been a friend and mentor to him.

Stone responded to Nunberg’s comments in a text message Monday: “I was briefly part of the Trump campaign and [have] been the President’s friend and adviser for decades and would expect that Mueller’s team would at some point ask for any documents or emails sent or written by me. But let me reiterate, I have no knowledge or involvement in Russian Collusion or any other inappropriate act.”

Nunberg also said he thinks former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page worked with the Kremlin. “I believe that Carter Page was colluding with the Russians,” Nunberg said on CNN. “That Carter Page is a weird dude.”

Page called Nunberg’s accusations “laughable” in a comment to the AP.

Page also has figured in the Russia investigation. The Justice Department and FBI obtained a secret warrant in October 2016 to monitor his communications. His activities during the presidential campaign that raised concerns included a July 2016 trip to Moscow.

Nunberg — who advised Trump in the run-up to the campaign but was fired shortly after Trump declared his candidacy — was unsparing in his criticism of the White House staff and even of the president himself.

In one of his CNN interviews, he said Trump sometimes acted like “an idiot,” noting that he met last year with Russian leaders inside the Oval Office, where he shared classified intelligence.

“Granted, Donald Trump caused this because he’s an idiot,” Nunberg told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “Who the hell advised him to allow those Russians in the Oval Office?”

Nunberg told the AP he’d already blown a 3 p.m. Monday deadline to turn over the requested communications. He said he’d traded numerous emails a day with Stone and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and said spending 80 hours digging through his inbox to find them all was unreasonable.

But in that call, Nunberg said he might be more willing to comply if Mueller’s team limits the scope of its request.

“I’m happy if the scope changes and if they send me a subpoena that doesn’t include Carter Page,” he said, insisting the two had never spoken.

‘HE’S GOING TO LOSE’

John Dean, a White House counsel to President Richard Nixon during Watergate, tweeted Monday that Nunberg can’t flatly refuse to comply with a grand jury subpoena.

“This is not Mr. Nunberg’s decision, and he will be in criminal contempt for refusing to show up. He can take the Fifth Amendment. But he can’t tell the grand Jury to get lost. He’s going to lose this fight.”

Nunberg appeared pleased by his performance, telling the AP that he was “doing something I’ve never seen.”

“They don’t know what’s going on,” he said, speculating that Mueller would not appreciate his comments and suggesting the authorities might send police to his apartment.

Refusing to comply with a subpoena from the special counsel could have real consequences. Susan McDougal, a former business partner of President Bill Clinton, spent 18 months behind bars for civil contempt after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the Whitewater real estate controversy during Clinton’s presidency.

McDougal, who now works as a supervisor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said in an interview Monday that she would not do anything differently — though Nunberg should know that being incarcerated is no joke.

McDougal questioned why Nunberg was appearing on television suggesting he knew things that might be of interest to Mueller. “Why would he do that and then not cooperate?” she asked. “The difference is, I didn’t know anything.”

McDougal, 62, said she did not comply with the subpoena because by that time, she had lost trust in investigators — who she claimed had offered her a break in sentencing if she were to implicate the Clintons. She said she had told them she had nothing to offer and was alarmed that “they kept pushing me to say something to save myself.”

McDougal said if she were to give Nunberg advice, she would also tell him that if he thinks he’s going to stop Mueller from doing something, “they’ll do it anyway.”

SANDERS: ‘NO COLLUSION’

At the White House, officials quickly sought to distance the administration from Nunberg, who has not been in Trump’s good graces since his firing in August 2015 over racially insensitive Facebook posts.

Aides in the West Wing watched Nunberg’s television interviews closely, voicing frustration that he had thrust Russia back into the headlines and laughing over what they considered Nunberg’s lack of discipline.

Asked at her afternoon press briefing to respond to Nunberg’s suggestion that Mueller may have incriminating information about Trump, Sanders said, “There was no collusion with the Trump campaign.”

Sanders also played down Nunberg’s importance. “He hasn’t worked at the White House, so I certainly can’t speak to him or the lack of knowledge that he clearly has,” she said.

Nunberg, who lives in New York, forwarded to the Post an email listed as coming from Mueller’s office asking him to appear in front of a grand jury in Washington on Friday. He also shared a copy of what appears to be a twopage attachment to his grand jury subpoena seeking documents related to Trump and nine other people, including emails, correspondence, invoices, telephone logs, calendars and “records of any kind.”

Among those the subpoena requests information about are departing White House communications director Hope Hicks; Bannon; Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen; former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski; and Stone. Also on the list are Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman who faces numerous charges of money laundering and tax evasion, and Rick Gates, a former campaign aide and Manafort partner who has pleaded guilty to lying and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

“I’m not spending 80 hours going over my emails with Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and producing them,” Nunberg said. “Donald Trump won this election on his own. He campaigned his ass off. And there is nobody who hates him more than me.”

Nunberg added, “The Russians and Trump did not collude. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is too smart to collude with Donald Trump.”