President Donald Trump’s legal team and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators nearly reached a deal on the timing, location and scope of a Trump interview in January before negotiations fell through because Trump’s lawyers were at odds over the wisdom of letting the President testify.
The interview was going to be set at Camp David and last between two and six hours, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The two sides had agreed to narrow questions to focus on Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russia. Mueller’s team reportedly pressed for a six hour interview and even factored in when bathroom breaks could be taken, according to the WSJ.
But negotiations fell through, mostly because of former Trump lawyer John Dowd’s opposition to the testimony. Dowd sent Mueller’s team a 20-page letter to reject the interview and laid out the constitutional reasons Trump shouldn’t have to testify, WSJ reported.
Read the full report here:
No deal is good enough for DJT.
I imagine that Mueller doesn’t really need to have an interview with Trump, which means that Trump’s only negotiation insight is not effective in this case. Trump needs to have this investigation into his misdeeds, and those of his campaign, be over, without casting any shadows over his illusory sense of himself as a master of, well, any number of things. Baring a complete and catastrophic failure of what remains of the system, I don’t see how that happens. (Please Mr. Mueller, don’t let me down. You are pretty much my final hold on a reality that makes any sense at all.)
Idunno–the source was described as ‘people familiar with the matter’. That’s pretty thin even for a Trump story.
Mueller’s people aren’t chatty sorts, so it is most likely self-stroking by one of Trump’s lawyers, or ex-lawyers. I suspect more pr horseshit- perhaps Rudy is thinking himself especially clever this morning.
Dowd wrote a 20 page letter to justify turning down an interview which every other innocent elected official in the United States would run not walk to attend and which included Alan Dershowitz’s theory on why a Republican President, like Louis XIV, is such an exalted being that he should never be required to answer questions, because on matters of The Doctrine of Colluding with Our Enemies and Obstruction of Justice, a Republican President is Infallible.
I have no doubt that the egomaniac in the Oval Office desperately wants to work his bigly deal making skillz on Mueller. But his feral survival instinct won’t let him. So he’ll keep going back and forth and back and forth. I won’t believe this interview will happen until they strike a commemorative coin celebrating the occasion.