Trump lawyer holds off on Mueller interview OK

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s lead attorney said Sunday that lawyers have put off a decision on an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller because of their concern about what the president sees as a corrupt and tainted probe.

“How you could expect us to just walk up our client like a lamb going to the slaughter? We wouldn’t be lawyers if we would do that,” Rudy Giuliani said on ABC’s This Week, one of three television appearances he made Sunday.

The Justice Department is probing possible coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president. Giuliani called it “the most corrupt investigation I have ever seen,” taking his cue from the president. On Saturday, Trump tweeted about “the Rigged Witch Hunt and the ‘Special’ Counsel.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press, Giuliani said he doesn’t think Mueller, a former FBI director, is personally biased or corrupt, but that “he’s surrounded by biased people” he failed to vet properly, including FBI agent Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump text exchanges from 2016 fed Republican allegations of bias.

Mueller removed Strzok from his team as soon as the texts were discovered, and Mueller is a Republican.

But Giuliani said on NBC that Trump’s lawyers wouldn’t recommend an interview for the president “unless they can satisfy us that there is some basis for this investigation.”

“It’s our firm belief, and we think nothing contradicts this, the president did nothing wrong,” Giuliani said.

On CNN’s State of the Union, Giuliani said that if Mueller issued a subpoena to compel Trump to testify, his legal team believes it could be quashed.

Giuliani also said he has no concerns about what Michael Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer and so-called fixer, may tell investigators.

The former New York mayor said on NBC that it’s “great” if Cohen wants to cooperate with investigators because “we’ve been through all the records” and “he has no evidence of, nor was he involved in, anything untoward with the president.”

“As long as he tells the truth, we’re home free,” Giuliani said on ABC.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Cohen’s business practices, as is Mueller’s team. Federal agents searched Cohen’s home and office in April, and speculation has since mounted that he might turn on Trump and provide evidence to federal officials that could implicate the president or his campaign.

In an earlier interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopolous, Cohen said his primary loyalty was to his family and to the United States, a notable change from earlier statements that indicated he was prepared to “take a bullet” and “do anything” to protect Trump.

Giuliani said he was not concerned by the interview.

“We have no reason to believe he did anything wrong,” Giuliani said. “The president did nothing wrong with him, so we’ve gone through every document we can. We see no evidence of it.”

Giuliani also said on ABC that he has counseled the president against granting a pardon to Cohen if such a scenario arose.

“I have advised the president, which he understands: no discussion of pardons,” Giuliani said.

But he also argued that to rule out a pardon “wouldn’t be fair to — to the president, wouldn’t be fair to Cohen, wouldn’t be fair to future presidents. But the fact is there’s no reason for a pardon right now … and, quite honestly, it would just confuse everything.”

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Niquette of Bloomberg News and by Shane Harris of The Washington Post.