Special counsel Robert Mueller wants his investigators to interview six top people who advised President Trump from the White House – including recently departed press secretary Sean Spicer and longtime press aide Hope Hicks.
Mueller also wants his probers to talk to former Trump Chief of Staff Reince Preibus, the Washington Post reported. All three staffers were involved in producing documents that investigators are parsing as Mueller probes Russian election interference and any efforts to obstruct justice.
Mueller has contacted the White House about interviewing staffers who crafted the initial statement about Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer, according to a report.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday she was unaware of such a request, but promised cooperation.
Others who Mueller reportedly wants to talk to FBI investigators include White House counsel Don McGahn, a deputy, James Burnham, and Josh Raffel, who provides press support for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Mueller, who is probing Russian interference in the elections, wants to interview staffers who wrote the statement about the June 2016 meeting.
Trump Jr. met privately Thursday with a Senate committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to interview White House staff about a press statement that described the meeting in misleading terms
That statement turns out to have been misleading by saying the meeting was about adoption issues rather than about potential dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign rival Hillary Clinton. CNN reported on the request to interview those involved in its crafting.
‘I’m not aware of a specific request at this time but certainly we’ve been very clear that the White House will be fully cooperative and transparent through his process.’
The report said Mueller had not asked to interview President Trump ‘at this time.’
The Washington Post reported that Trump personally dictated the statement, although the White House disputed the claim.
‘The president weighed in, as any father would, based on the limited information he had,’ Sanders said in August.
The initial statement to the New York Times said meeting participants ‘primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.’
President Donald Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., told a U.S. Senate panel on Thursday that he attended a meeting last year that included a Russian lawyer because he hoped it would yield information about Democrat Hillary Clinton’s ‘fitness, character or qualifications’ to be president.
Emails subsequently released by Trump Jr. revealed that British music publicist Rob Goldstone had lined up the meeting with a promise of derogatory information on Hillary Clinton – and a reference of Russian government support for Trump.
Conversations with White House officials could contribute to his investigation of whether Trump engaged in obstruction of justice related to the Russia probe. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who testified that Trump complained to him about the Russia investigation.
Trump’s oldest son told a different story to a U.S. Senate panel on Thursday that he attended the meeting because he hoped it would yield information about Democrat Hillary Clinton’s ‘fitness, character or qualifications’ to be president.
Trump Jr. made his first appearance on Capitol Hill as part of a Senate investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, sitting for a five-hour grilling.
Senate Judiciary Committee staff heard Trump Jr. read a prepared statement, which described a June 2016 meeting he attended at Trump Tower which included publicist Rob Goldstone, Russian-Azerbaijani singer-songwriter Emin Agalarov, Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the future president’s son-in-law.
In an email, Trump recalled, Goldstone ‘suggested that someone had ‘official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia’ and that the information would be ‘very useful’ to the campaign.’
‘I was somewhat skeptical of his outreach,’ he said Thursday, since he knew Goldstone only as a pop music promoter.
‘As it later turned out, my skepticism was justified. The meeting provided no meaningful information and turned out not to be about what had been represented.’
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ about meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in footage aired Wednesday
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ about meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in footage aired Wednesday
Trump Jr. said after his grilling that he was ‘thankful’ for the Senate Judiciary Committee staff’s ‘professionalism and courtesy’
Mueller’s investigators have been probing the president’s role in crafting his son’s July 8 statement that he was ‘not told the name of the person’ he was meeting, according to ‘three sources familiar with the matter’ cited by NBC News in a report late last month.
That statement from Trump Jr was later undermined by further revelations.
The investigators want to know what the president knew about the meeting and whether he sought to conceal its purpose, the sources said.
The initial statement said in part: ‘We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.’