Giuliani: Trump could defy Mueller subpoena
WASHINGTON — Rudy Giuliani, reeling after a chaotic first week as President Donald Trump’s lawyer, tried again Sunday to straighten out his client’s story. But Giuliani raised new questions about whether Trump had paid hush money to other women and suggested the president might invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor hired by Trump to smooth communication between the White House and the special counsel, Robert Mueller, instead painted Mueller as an out-ofcontrol prosecutor bent on trapping Trump into committing perjury. The president, he said, could defy a subpoena to testify.
“We don’t have to,” Giuliani said in a rambling, 22-minute interview on ABC’s “This Week” program. “He’s the president of the United States. We can assert the same privileges other presidents have.”
Giuliani, who met with the special counsel’s office shortly after joining the legal team last month, said he and another lawyer, Jay Sekulow, agreed the president should not speak to Mueller. But he acknowledged he had little, if any, control over the president, who said as recently as Friday he still wanted to speak to the special counsel.
“How can I ever be confident of that?” Giuliani said, when asked whether Trump would not invoke his right to avoid selfincrimination. “I’m facing a situation with the president and all the other lawyers are, in which every lawyer in America thinks he would be a fool to testify, I’ve got a client who wants to testify.”
It was one of a several startling admissions by Giuliani, during his first extended television appearance since Trump criticized him last week for not having his “facts straight” about payments made to a pornographic film actress, Stephanie Clifford. Giuliani said it was possible that Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had made additional payments to other women on the president’s behalf.
“I have no knowledge of that,” Giuliani said when asked about other payments, “but I would think if it was necessary, yes.”
If Trump were to invoke the Fifth Amendment, he would undercut his long-standing claim that he has nothing to hide about his campaign’s ties to Russia.