Trump team eyes ways to derail Mueller probe
President’s lawyers are looking for any conflicts of interest.
President Donald Trump’s private lawyers are probing special counsel Robert Mueller and his legal team for conflicts of interest, and even looking into the president’s power to pardon himself and his inner circle, news reports said Friday.
The new drive to push back on and even undermine the credibility of the Justice Department’s special counsel comes as Mueller and his team began taking a closer look at the finances of Trump, his family and his associates, including deals before he was president.
The reports follow Trump’s interview published Thursday in which he said that Mueller and members of his team have conflicts of interest and warned the special prosecutor not to cross a red line by shifting his investigation from Russia and into his family’s finances.
It also comes ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing next week to question Donald Trump Jr., Trump aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort about contacts with Russians during the campaign.
“There are so many conflicts that everybody has,” Trump said in a New York Times interview, offering a critique that went beyond the special prosecutor’s staff to include the deputy FBI director and the deputy attorney general who appointed Mueller.
And the president has asked his advisers about the extent of his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in the probe, one unnamed source said, and a second source said his lawyers have been discussing pardons themselves, the Washington Post reported.
The new aggressive approach by Trump’s legal team comes as it goes through a shake-up in which its spokesman resigned and Washington veteran attorneys Ty Cobb and John Dowd took the lead from Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, several news reports said.
Trump’s lawyers “will consistently evaluate the issue of conflicts and raise them in the appropriate venue,” Trump team attorney Jay Sekulow told the Associated Press on Thursday.
Among them, Trump said in the interview, are campaign contributions to Democrats by members of Mueller’s team, Mueller’s interviewing for the FBI director’s job the day before he was appointed special counsel and, reports said, even Mueller’s resignation from a Trump golf club.
Rep. Chris Collins (D-Buffalo), a key Trump supporter, told CNN that the campaign contributions were not a valid conflict — “money is the ugly side of politics,” he said. Collins also called Mueller a “man of integrity.” He did not extend that praise to Mueller’s team.
The attack on the special counsel is reminiscent of the campaign that President Bill Clinton and his aides pressed against Independent Counsel Ken Starr in the 1990s, said former Clinton aide Paul Begala and other commentators.
“The possibility that the President is considering pardons at this early stage in these ongoing investigations is extremely disturbing,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a statement Thursday night.