Prepared to fight Mueller interview if request denied
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s legal team would advise that he refuse to submit to an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller unless the team can review classified information shared with select lawmakers about the origins of the FBI investigation into Russia’s election meddling, Trump’s personal lawyer said Sunday.
Rudy Giuliani said that should Mueller’s investigators seek a court order to compel the president to testify, Trump’s lawyers would fight such a subpoena all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. “I think we win it,” Giuliani said. Giuliani downplayed the chances that Trump would fire Mueller. Asked if Trump would dismiss anyone if the investigation kept going, Giuliani told “Fox News Sunday” that firings would play “into the hands of playing the victim, Watergate.”
Justice Department officials didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on whether the president had requested a briefing similar to what was provided to members of Congress last week.
In a separate television appearance, Giuliani said Trump was “adamant” about wanting to agree to an interview, saying, “If he wasn’t thinking about it and it wasn’t an active possibility, we would be finished with that by now and we would have moved on to getting the investigation over with another way.”
The new wrinkle, he said, is the disclosure about the informant.
“We are more convinced, as we see it, that this is a rigged investigation. Now we have this whole new ‘Spygate’ thing thrown on top of it, on top of already very legitimate questions,” he told CNN’S “State of the Union.”
Giuliani also raised the specter of a protracted legal fight over the question of a Trump interview if Mueller decided to seek a subpoena.
“What we have to do is go to court and seek protection from the court, if we have to do that. Our first thing is we sure as heck are not going to testify unless it’s all straightened out, unless we learned the basis of that Russian investigation,” Giuliani told Fox.