Trump changes his tune on a Mueller interview
President Trump's lawyers apparently expect their client will be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but it seems the president has different plans.
During a press conference Wednesday, Fox News' John Roberts asked Trump if he would agree to be interviewed as part of Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a nearly two-minute response, the president took the opportunity to call the investigation "a Democrat hoax," attacked his former presidential rival Hillary Clinton, and denied allegations of collusion between his campaign and the Russian government.
He ended with a shrug, despite Roberts' pressing: "We'll see what happens."
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Last June, Trump said he would "100 percent" testify to Mueller if asked to. But on Wednesday, he insisted that because "virtually everybody" agrees that there was "no collusion" between his campaign and the Russian government, "it seems unlikely that you'd even have an interview."
Trump's lawyers now reportedly want Mueller to accept some form of written questioning rather than a face-to-face interaction with the president, but a former federal prosecutor told Vox that such an arrangement is unlikely: "Prosecutors are interested in a subject's responses to detailed lines of questioning without the opportunity to have lawyers carefully craft their client's answer," he said.
