Donald Trump’s attorney said Friday that if the president felt confident special counsel Robert Mueller weren’t setting a ‘perjury trap’ for him, he would be willing to immediately sit down and answer questions related to the year-long probe of Russian election meddling.
Rudy Giuliani also said Friday morning on CNN’s ‘New Day’ program that Mueller has narrowed the scope of potential questions for the president, even as Trump himself promoted an unconfirmed theory that the Justice Department planted a spy in his 2016 campaign because it was ‘out to frame him.’
Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, claimed Mueller has cut down his list of question topics from five to two, as part of a negotiation over how he can get Trump to testify on the record.
He added that no questions are expected about the president’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who faces a separate criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, not Mueller.
‘I mean – no secret that the whole thing with Michael Cohen’s out,’ Giuliani explained, ‘because that’s in the southern district of New York. It’s my belief that he [Mueller] turned all of it over.’
But even a limited scope of questions won’t pass muster with the president, he said, unless the White House is convinced Mueller is seeking only facts, not a particular political outcome.
‘The president would testify tomorrow if it was about the truth. The truth is he had nothing to do with Russia,’ Giuliani said.
‘You’ve got people that are going to ask questions like, “what did you say to him?” “What did you say to him?”‘ he said of Mueller’s team of inquisitors.
Giuliani also claimed former FBI Director James Comey would likely be Mueller’s secret weapon against Trump – but that Comey, now a firmly anti-Trump memoirist, can’t be counted on to be honest.
‘You’ve got Comey coming forward, who will lie,’ he said.
And referring to a celebrity chef who spent five months behind bars for lying about an insider-trading case, Giuliani marveled that ‘Martha Stewart never would have gone to jail if she hadn’t gone and testified.’
Giuliani’s comments came after Trump fired off an early morning tweet that seemed intended to undercut the Russia investigation, which he has repeatedly called a ‘witch hunt.’
Promoting a theory that is circulating in conservative circles, Trump quoted Fox Business Network anchor David Asman and tweeted: ‘Apparently the DOJ put a Spy in the Trump Campaign. This has never been done before and by any means necessary, they are out to frame Donald Trump for crimes he didn’t commit.’
On whether there was an ‘informant’ in the 2016 presidential campaign, Giuliani said on CNN, ‘I don’t know for sure, nor does the president, if there really was one,’ though he said they have long been told there was ‘some kind of infiltration.’
A columnist for the conservative National Review magazine this week raised questions about a possible FBI spy nested inside Trump’s campaign.
The writer, a former federal prosecutor, cited work by Rep. Devin Nunes, an ardent Trump supporter and head of the House intelligence committee, who has demanded information about an FBI source.
The New York Times reported separately this week that at least one government informant met several times with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, both former foreign policy advisers on Trump’s Republican campaign.
In a tweet Thursday, Trump cited the National Review article suggesting that if there had actually been an FBI mole inside his 2016 campaign organization, ‘this is bigger than Watergate!’