The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Trump wouldn’t meet with Mueller until after summit
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump and his lawyers probably won’t decide whether he will sit down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller until after the president’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next month, according to the president’s legal team.
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s new attorney, said in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday that any preparation with Trump for a possible interview with investigators would likely be delayed until after the June 12 summit in Singapore because “I wouldn’t want to take his concentration off something far, far more important.”
Trump’s lawyers haven’t decided whether it would be in the president’s best interests anyway to speak with Mueller. Giuliani said he had hoped to resolve that question by May 17, the oneyear anniversary of Mueller’s appointment, but that was no longer feasible.
“Several things delayed us, with the primary one being the whole situation with North Korea,” Giuliani said. “The president has been very busy. It really would be pretty close to impossible to spend the amount of time on it we would need.”
Though Giuliani would not provide an exact date for when a determination would be made about the interview, he said it probably “would be silly to make a decision” much before the highly anticipated summit. He said that the demands on Trump’s time meant that his legal team had “not done a lot” in terms of preparing the president for a possible in-person interview.
“It would take a while and he’s focused on North Korea,” said Giuliani.
A number of Trump allies, including Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday, have recently stepped up calls for Mueller’s investigation to wrap up, suggesting it was interfering in the president’s ability to do the country’s business. Mueller’s team is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with Trump associates as well as whether the president obstructed justice. So far, the special counsel’s office has charged 19 people — including four Trump campaign advisers — and three Russian companies.
Both Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, have pleaded guilty and are now cooperating with the probe. A number of other former White House and campaign staffers, like Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, as well as Inauguration Day committee chairman Tom Barrack, have been interviewed.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, demurred
when asked if Trump would consider it a “red line” for his children to be interviewed. His daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both worked on the campaign and are senior advisers at the White House, while Trump’s adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were also leading figures on the campaign. Giuliani said he did not expect those interviews with Mueller to take place.
“Our understanding is that he’s pretty much finished,” Giuliani said. “Doing more interviews would be inconsistent with what he’s indicated would be the timeframe of the investigation.”
The special counsel had floated the idea of issuing a grand jury subpoena for Trump, his former attorney John Dowd has previously said. Even if Mueller’s team decided to subpoena Trump as part of the investigation, he could still fight it in court or refuse to answer questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination.
It’s unclear how serious prosecutors were about a potential subpoena or whether the matter has come up since.