Mueller hints at presidential subpoena
Trump lawyers told of that possibility if president won’t talk
Special counsel Robert Mueller, in a meeting with President Trump's lawyers in March, raised the possibility of a subpoena for Trump if he declines to talk to investigators.
WASHINGTON — In a tense meeting in early March with the special counsel, President Donald Trump’s lawyers insisted he had no obligation to talk with federal investigators probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
But special counsel Robert Mueller responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.
Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer.
“This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”
The flare-up set in motion weeks of turmoil among Trump’s attorneys as they debated how to deal with the special counsel’s request for an interview, a dispute that ultimately led to Dowd’s resignation.
In the wake of the testy March 5 meeting, Mueller’s team agreed to provide the president’s lawyers with more specific information about the subjects that prosecutors wished to discuss with the president. With those details in hand, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow compiled a list of 49 questions that the team believed the president would be asked, according to three of the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The New York Times first reported the existence of the list.
The questions focus on events during the Trump campaign, transition and presidency that have long known to be under scrutiny, including the president’s reasons for firing then-FBI Director James Comey and the pressure he put on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. Now Trump’s newly reconfigured legal team is pondering how to address the special counsel’s queries, all while contending with a client who has grown increasingly opposed to sitting down with the special counsel.
The standoff could turn into a historic confrontation before the Supreme Court over a presidential subpoena.
Sekulow and Dowd declined to comment. Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined to comment.
The president has repeatedly decried the investigation as a “witch hunt.”
“Oh, I see ... you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!” Trump tweeted Tuesday.
In the meantime, Trump’s lawyers are also considering whether to provide Mueller with written explanations of the episodes he is examining. After investigators laid out 16 specific subjects they wanted to review with the president and added a few topics within each one, Sekulow broke the queries down into 49 separate questions, according to people familiar with the process.
Paul Rosenzweig, who worked as a senior counsel on independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigation during the Clinton administration, predicted that the president would face a long interview if the special counsel hewed to the list Sekulow compiled.
“This isn’t a list of 49 questions. It’s 49 topics,” Rosenzweig said. “Each of these topics results in dozens of questions. To be honest, that list is a two-day interview. You don’t get through it in an hour or two.”
For his part, Trump fumed when he saw the breadth of the questions that emerged out of the talks with Mueller’s team, according to two White House officials.
The president and several advisers now plan to point to the list as evidence that Mueller has strayed beyond his mandate and is overreaching, they said.
“Mueller is in Kenny Starr territory now,” said another Trump adviser, referring to how the controversial independent counsel investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s real estate deals in Arkansas ended up probing the president’s lies about a sexual relationship with a White House intern.