It’s been nearly one year since the US intelligence community published its preliminary report about Russia’s role in swaying the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s failure. And as the DOJ and FBI square off with Trump and his Congressional allies over the dubious Russia collusion investigation.
Meanwhile, Mueller has reportedly pivoted: He is now investigating whether the president purposefully obstructed justice when he asked former FBI Director James Comey to take it easy on former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn.
With the political news media still reeling from the myriad outlandish claims from Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” The Washington Post reported Monday that Mueller is pushing to arrange a time to interview President Trump.
Unsurprisingly, Trump and his legal team have been pushing to avoid just such an interview since the probe began.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has raised the likelihood with President Trump’s legal team that his office will seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks.
Mueller brought up the issue of interviewing Trump during a late December meeting with the president’s lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow. Mueller deputy James Quarles, who oversees the White House portion of the special counsel investigation, also attended.
The special counsel’s team could interview Trump very soon on some limited portion of questions — possibly within the next several weeks, according to a person close to the president who was granted anonymity to describe internal conversations.
“This is moving faster than anyone really realizes,” the person said, who said Trump is comfortable participating in an interview and believes it would put to rest questions about whether his campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election.
However, as WaPo notes, Trump’s attorneys are reluctant to allow him to sit down for open-ended, face-to-face questioning without clear parameters. Since the December meeting, they have discussed whether the president could provide written answers to some portion of the questions from Mueller’s investigators, as then-President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra investigation. They have also discussed the obligation of Mueller’s team to demonstrate they could not obtain the information they are seeking without interviewing the President.
As we’ve pointed out in the past, Mueller’s decision to indict Flynn is essentially an insurance policy, as text messages from the lead FBI official at the heart of the probe unwittingly revealed (the texts, sent by special agent Peter Strzok to his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, revealed widespread bias at the agency).
In a statement delivered to WaPo, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the administration’s response to the Mueller investigation, said “the White House does not comment on communications with the OSC out of respect for the OSC and its process,” referring to the special counsel’s office.
“The White House is continuing its full cooperation with the OSC in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution,” Cobb added.
Cobb had repeatedly said all interviews of White House personnel by Mueller’s office were on schedule to be completed by the end of December or early this year. On Monday, he said he remains confident any portion of the investigation related to the president or the White House will wrap up shortly. A year ago, Trump received off-the-record assurances from Comey that he was not personally under investigation.
Of course, Trump’s penchant for speaking off the cuff is probably creating a not-insignificant amount of consternation for his legal team.
As Mueller’s probe pivots toward the finances of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (specifically how the firm leveraged a popular visa program to raise money for a pair of Kushner projects in New Jersey), Trump is probably feeling anxious. In his book “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff claimed that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, were afraid that Mueller would scrutinize the finances of both the Kushner and Trump family businesses.
Since the investigation has so far come up empty-handed – nobody has found a “smoking gun” proving that the campaign willfully coordinated strategy with the Russians.
So, as the investigation enters its second year, expect to learn more about the Trump family business as Mueller’s findings are swiftly leaked to the media.
via RSS http://ift.tt/2AHYf0J Tyler Durden