Giuliani says Trump can exert executive privilege or plead the Fifth to deflect a Mueller subpoena


President Trump can exert executive privilege to ignore a subpoena from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, Trump's new personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said Sunday on ABC's This Week. "We don't have to" comply with a Mueller subpoena, Giuliani said, because Trump is "the president of the United States" and his legal team "can assert the same privilege that other presidents have."
Giuliani also indicated Trump might invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if he did meet with Mueller. Though invoking the Fifth Amendment is not an admission of guilt, Trump himself has repeatedly claimed the innocent do not use this right.
For his part, the president has repeatedly expressed an interest in talking with the special counsel, even against his lawyers' wishes. "Nothing I want to do more, because we did nothing wrong," Trump said Friday of a Mueller interview. Watch two excerpts of Giuliani's comments below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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