Trump legal team seeking to avoid formal interview with Mueller — report
US president's attorneys said to suggest written responses or a signed affidavit declaring innocence of wrongdoing
The US president’s legal team has reportedly been reviewing its options for avoiding a formal interview of Donald Trump by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The attorneys have proposed having the president provide written responses to questions rather than sit through a question-and-answer session, NBC News reported Monday, quoting three people familiar with the developments.
Mueller, a former FBI director, was appointed by US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to lead an investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s election campaign and the Russians. He has not yet asked to speak with the president, but attorneys are preparing for the possibility.
Trump’s legal representatives have held discussion with FBI officials about how a possible interview would play out. The talks are said to be preliminary and ongoing, the report said.
Members of Trump’s team met with representatives for Mueller in December. Neither Trump’s team nor the special counsel’s office would comment on the matter.
In particular, the president’s legal team wants to know whether the special counsel would seek to directly interview the president “as well as the legal standard for when a president can be interviewed, the location of a possible interview, the topics, and the duration,” the report said.
Two of the sources said that the legal team is also looking at reaching a compromise that would negate the need for a formal interview.
Another option under consideration is a sworn affidavit from Trump, declaring he did nothing wrong and did not collude with the Russians, the report said.
One source said that Trump’s legal team already began looking at ways to avoid an interview back in October 2017, when the president’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was indicted for money laundering over his business activities with Ukraine.
Former Justice Department officials told NBC that Mueller is unlikely to agree to anything less than a formal interview with the president.
Renowned criminal defense attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz was quoted as saying that what the Trump legal team was doing was “what any criminal defense attorney would do.”
In December, Michael Flynn, the retired general who vigorously campaigned at Trump’s side and then served as his first national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about reaching out to the Russians on Trump’s behalf and said members of the president’s inner circle were intimately involved with — and at times directing — his contacts.
Mueller’s team announced charges in October against three other Trump campaign officials: Manafort, his business associate Rick Gates, and a former campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his own foreign contacts.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.