Hoping to have Trump cleared, legal team eases resistance to inquiry
WASHINGTON — White House officials once debated a scorched-earth strategy of publicly criticizing and undercutting Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to disrupt last year’s election. Now, President Donald Trump’s lawyers are pursuing a different course: cooperating with the special counsel in the hope that Mueller will declare in the coming months that Trump is not a target of the Russia inquiry.
Trump has long sought such a public declaration. He fired his FBI director, James B. Comey, in May after Comey refused to say openly that Trump was not under investigation.
The president’s legal team is working swiftly to respond to requests from Mueller for emails, documents and memos, and will make White House officials available for interviews. Once Mueller has combed through the evidence, Trump’s lawyers plan to ask him to affirm that Trump is not under investigation, either for colluding with Russian operatives or trying to obstruct justice.
More than a half-dozen White House officials, witnesses and outside lawyers connected to the Russia inquiry have described the approach, which is as much a public relations strategy as a legal one. The president’s legal team aims to argue that the White House has nothing to hide, hoping to shift the burden to Mueller to move quickly to wrap up an investigation that has consumed the Trump administration’s first year.
“The White House believes the special counsel shares its interest in concluding this matter with all deliberate speed for the benefit of the country,” said Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer handling the response to Mueller’s investigation. He said the administration was cooperating “with hope of bringing the matter to a prompt and decisive end.”
Any public declaration by Mueller about the president’s innocence would also be a clear sign that the special counsel’s investigation had not broadened significantly beyond last year’s presidential campaign to include a scrutiny of any of Trump’s past business dealings with Russians.
Whether the strategy will work is another matter. The plan rests on the premise that Trump has done nothing wrong — something the president has repeatedly told his lawyers and said publicly — and some lawyers connected to the investigation say that Cobb has been too willing to take the president at his word. If the White House moves too hastily, they argue, materials could end up in Mueller’s hands that might damage the president and other administration officials.
Donald F. Mcgahn II, the White House counsel, previously expressed fears that the document production could set a bad precedent for future administrations. Cobb has told aides that the White House should move deliberately and carefully but not drag its feet.
Others doubt that Mueller will publicly clear Trump anytime soon even if the documents and interviews do not show that he committed a crime. Mueller is building cases against two of Trump’s former advisers, Paul J. Manafort and Michael T. Flynn. Should either man cooperate with investigators, it might change Mueller’s view of how Trump fits into the Russia investigation.
Nevertheless, the president’s advisers have concluded that this strategy represents their best chance to lift the cloud hanging over the administration.
“Good for them if they can pull it off,” said Barbara Van Gelder, a prominent Washington white-collar lawyer who served in the Justice Department with Mueller. She said he was highly unlikely to give the White House any assurances as long as the investigations into Manafort and Flynn were open.
“Mueller’s not going to make a statement,” she said, “because he’s not going to want to claw it back.”
Cobb and several White House lawyers have spent weeks reviewing documents related to numerous subjects, including Trump’s firing of Comey and his role in July in drafting a misleading statement to The New York Times about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016.
Mueller’s prosecutors have indicated that they plan to ask detailed questions about that statement, written aboard Air Force One, which withheld the purpose of the June 2016 meeting: to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s efforts to help Trump.
Some of Trump’s associates remain suspicious of the special counsel and his team of aggressive prosecutors.
“While it would be good to clear the air on this entire issue so that the president can focus on governing, it presupposes that Mueller is an honest broker and that he would not take nothing and make it into something, which would be my concern,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser.
Even as the White House pushes for a swift resolution of Mueller’s inquiry, administration officials are bracing for fallout from the investigations into Manafort and Flynn. Prosecutors have signaled that they intend to indict Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign, who is under scrutiny for tax and foreign lobbying matters.
But lawyers in the case say they see no evidence yet that Manafort will face charges of conspiring with Russia to disrupt the election.
The White House also hopes for a favorable report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating Russian election interference and several related matters. The committee’s leaders said in the past week that they planned to release a public report about their findings.
That report could be finished before Mueller’s investigation. Although committee leaders said they would leave any criminal matters to the Justice Department, a determination by the committee that none of Trump’s associates assisted the Russian campaign would be a boon for the White House even if Mueller refuses to publicly clear Trump.
“They want them to write a report saying ‘no collusion,’” said Van Gelder, the defense lawyer. “And then they can let Mueller twist in the wind.”