Lawyer insists Trump not under investigation
WASHINGTON — A member of President Donald Trump’s legal team said Sunday that the president was not under investigation by the special counsel looking into Russia’s election-year meddling, contradicting Trump’s assertion in a Friday morning tweet that he is a subject of the widening inquiry.
The denial Sunday by Jay Sekulow, one of several personal lawyers Trump has hired to represent him in the Russia case, is the latest of many examples in which the president’s aides and lawyers have scrambled to avert a public-relations mess created by Trump’s tweets, off-script remarks or leaked private conversations.
Advisers have been forced to perform postpresidential cleanup in the wake of Trump’s tweet claiming he had been wiretapped by the Obama administration, his Oval Office comments to Russian diplomats about the former FBI director James Comey, his private musings about the possibility of firing the Russia special counsel, his suggestion that there might be recordings of White House conversations, and his comments about a “military” deportation operation.
In Sekulow’s case, his appearance on multiple Sunday morning talk shows took on the added urgency of trying to protect his client from admitting that he is in legal jeopardy during a criminal investigation, one that appears to be increasingly focused on whether Trump took steps to interfere with the normal progress of the federal inquiry.
Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general, last month named Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, as a special counsel to lead the investigation into the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and whether any of Trump’s associates colluded in that effort.
In addition, two congressional committees have issued subpoenas for testimony and documents as part of their wideranging, bipartisan investigations.
All three inquiries are reportedly examining whether Trump, as president, sought to impede the progress of the inquiries.
Sekulow repeatedly and forcefully denied that Sunday, saying on CBS’ Face the Nation program that “the president has not been and is not under investigation,” and insisting that the administration had received no information from the special counsel’s office to think otherwise.
On Friday, Trump wrote the opposite on Twitter, saying: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.”