Rudy Giuliani says Trump can't afford to be distracted by a Mueller interview

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published 3 May 2018

When he wasn't dropping bombshells about President Trump reimbursing lawyer Michael Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels, Rudy Giuliani told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night that Trump is too busy doing important things to be troubled by an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The New York Times reported this week that during a meeting in March with Trump's legal team, Mueller suggested that he might issue a subpoena to compel Trump to testify. Giuliani, now Trump's lead lawyer for the case, said "if they issue a subpoena, that will be unprecedented in the sense that it's pretty clear a president can't be subpoenaed to a criminal proceeding about him. Why is that? Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, we have a real life circumstance going on that the Founding Fathers thought about."

A president "cannot be distracted by a criminal investigation," Giuliani continued. "You can always prosecute them after, they can get him when he leaves the White House." (Three presidents have been subpoenaed, most famously Richard Nixon.) If Mueller ever agreed to a two-hour interview, where he would just ask questions Trump was willing to answer, "I could not go to the president of the United States and say, 'Take two days to get ready for that, and screw the whole thing with North Korea,'" Giuliani said. "How could any American do that?" Trump is "going to negotiate, I believe, a non-nuclear situation on the Korean peninsula, and you're going to interfere with that?" Watch the video below. Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.