Ex-Trump aide may refuse subpoena
WASHINGTON — It began with a subpoena. It ended with a question about whether its recipient was drunk on live television.
Sam Nunberg, a onetime Trump campaign aide who recently met with investigators for the special counsel, set cable news alight Monday when he declared that he was subpoenaed to go before a grand jury on Friday, but that he was unlikely to appear or to provide documents he was ordered to hand over.
He indicated he did not know what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, was seeking by ordering him to appear before the grand jury and to turn over a number of documents. There was no way to authenticate the subpoena; Mueller’s office declined to comment.
But Nunberg said he was unconcerned about the potential for being arrested. By midafternoon, he had been interviewed on MSNBC and CNN. Fox News soon joined in with coverage.
On air, Nunberg denigrated Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, as a “slob.” Twitter cataloged his insults, mesmerized by his repeat performances. One CNN host asked him if he had been drinking.
By evening, Nunberg told reporters he might comply with Mueller’s demand after all. Unless he doesn’t, of course. And so it went with Nunberg, a protégé of the self-described dirty trickster Roger Stone, who has been a focus of aspects of the various investigations into possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
Part of the subpoena document, which Nunberg provided to The New York Times, is dated Feb. 27 and makes no mention of requiring him to appear before the grand jury. It calls only for him to preserve documents from Nov. 1, 2015, through the present related to several people connected to the Trump campaign. They include President Donald Trump; departing White House communications director Hope Hicks; a former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski; Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist; Trump’s longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller; former Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen; and Stone, a longtime confidant of Trump’s.
“They have requested a ridiculous amount of documents,” Nunberg said. “Should I spend 30 hours producing these? I don’t know what they have. They may very well have something on the president. But they are unfairly targeting Roger Stone.”
The subpoena also demands any documents related to Carter Page, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who was secretly surveilled by the Justice Department as part of the Russia investigation, as well as Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, and his deputy, Rick Gates. Manafort has been indicted on a string of money laundering and fraud charges, and Gates recently pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigators.
The list of people about whom Mueller is seeking information from Nunberg raises questions about his target, as does the time frame. Nunberg was fired by Trump during the summer of 2015 and thus was gone from the campaign in November. And he and Lewandowski are known to be combatants.
Still, Nunberg — whose mentor, Stone, goes by the motto that all press is good press — spent hours Monday engaged in a media tour with The Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, describing his plans to flout the subpoena and professing his lack of concern about what could happen to him.
“I was fired within six weeks” of the campaign’s start, Nunberg told The Times, despite having “saved” Trump during a fight with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that summer after Trump’s remark that McCain was not a war hero because he was captured in Vietnam. McCain was shot down during the war and imprisoned for more than five years in Hanoi, refusing early release even after being beaten repeatedly.
Nunberg added that the president often sounded “like a moron, but this whole thing is a witch hunt.”
Nunberg said he anticipated his lawyer, Patrick J. Brackley, would fire him for speaking publicly. Brackley did not immediately respond to an email asking whether that was the case.
Nunberg could avoid appearing before the grand jury if his lawyer sent prosecutors a letter asserting his Fifth Amendment rights not to incriminate himself. If that does not happen, Mueller’s prosecutors could ask a judge for a bench warrant for Nunberg’s arrest.