Trump won’t talk to Mueller

Defensive in interview about probe, Khashoggi

U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview aired Sunday that he probably would not sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, asserting: “We’ve wasted enough time on this witch hunt and the answer is, probably, we’re finished.”

The president claimed that he had no idea that his acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, viewed the Mueller investigation skeptically, despite reports the two had many conversations about the inquiry over the past year. The comments from Trump were made during a wide-ranging interview with Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, who sat with the president at the White House last week. The president continued to be defensive about his abandoned trip to a U.S. military cemetery during a visit to Paris last week. He also said he chose not to listen to audio of journalist Jamal Khashoggi being killed by people connected to the Saudi crown prince last month.

His comments on the Mueller investigation marked an apparent reversal from a year of claiming that he was willing and eager to be interviewed by the special counsel, who is investigating possible collusion between the president’s campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 election. Instead, Trump’s legal team is working on providing written answers to some, but not all, of Mueller’s questions this week.