President Trump will not be interviewed as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, according to former Trump lawyer and U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, who told Fox News Sunday that the investigation is now in “bad faith.”
“The president will not sit down for an interview because this investigation has reached a level of bad faith,” said diGenova “This is no longer a good faith investigation.”
Joe diGenova: “The president will not sit down for an interview because this investigation has now reached the level of bad faith, this is no longer a good faith investigation.” #FoxNewsSunday https://t.co/F6gn4EkMZJ pic.twitter.com/LD09KWXSNl
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 6, 2018
DiGenova suggested that the judge in Paul Manafort’s case, T.S. Ellis, “did something very important on Friday. He started a civics lesson about what the constitution is about, and about what the powers of a Special Counsel are,” adding that Mueller “should be ashamed of himself” over the way the FBI conducted the raid on Paul Manafort’s home – pulling him from his bed and handcuffing his wife at 3 a.m.
Yesterday we noted the intense courtroom battle which played out on Friday between Judge Ellis and Mueller attorney Michael Dreeben in which Ellis put the Special Counsel in its place six ways from Sunday during a motion-for-dismissal hearing – giving prosecutors two weeks to produce evidence that Manafort was colluding with the Russians.
That is what elicited Judge Ellis’s response that we don’t want “unfettered power.”
Judge Ellis continues, saying he’s not going to be persuaded that Mueller has “unlimited powers to do anything” Mueller wants. pic.twitter.com/rysP4lIH9x
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 5, 2018
Joe diGenova on Manafort raid: “Bob Mueller should be ashamed of himself to allow that to happen on his watch.” #FoxNewsSunday https://t.co/F6gn4EkMZJ pic.twitter.com/fkyWwzYg4S
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 6, 2018
President Trump has repeatedly expressed a willingness to testify in front of the Special Counsel, mentioning as recently as last week “I would love to speak… I would love to go through with it, if I thought it was fair to override my lawyers.”
Red-faced Rudy
Both diGenova and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz have dinged Rudy Giuliani over comments made last week that Trump reimbursed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
🚨 Giuliani says Trump repaid Cohen the $130,000 used as hush money for Stormy Daniels pic.twitter.com/pqNtZthgwf
— Jon Passantino (@passantino) May 3, 2018
DiGenova says that Giuliani’s comments are a “nothing buger,” that serve “no useful purpose in terms of the facts.”
“If it is a purely personal matter, which this clearly has to be, it doesn’t matter what its relationship was to the timetable in a campaign,” –Joe diGenova
Giuliani has since been making the media rounds trying to smooth out and clarify his comments – with the grand takeway being that the payments to Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) were perfectly legal.
Alan Dershowitz, meanwhile, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that Giuliani’s comments (whether intentional or not) “plays into the hands of Mueller’s tactic to try at any cost … to find technical violations against lower-ranking people so that they can be squeezed.”
The Harvard Law professor emeritus also said that Trump’s team is “admitting to enough that warrants scrutiny,” and that it’s been a “bad week for both sides.”
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