Rudy Giuliani lays out conditions for Trump interview with Mueller
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, said he has advised the president against sitting down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators but "the president wants to do it." What shape that potential interview might take is still up in the air, but Giuliani laid out the broad outlines of on "Face the Nation" Sunday.
Giuliani has given a July 4 deadline for a final decision on whether the president will sit down with Mueller's team. Negotiations had been delayed due to the summit with North Korea in Singapore earlier this month.
"We are in rather sensitive negotiations with them and for this I will commend them, because they've kept an open mind to this," he said Sunday. "There might be a narrow area that we could all agree on." He said that he would prefer "something responded to in writing. And it could be under oath."
Areas of negotiation include the format, the scope of questions and the duration.
- Rudy Giuliani calls for "full and complete" investigation into origins of Russia probe
- Transcript: Rudy Giuliani on "Face the Nation," June 17, 2018
"I think we've already agreed that it should be just audio recorded," Giuliani said, despite the precedent of former President Bill Clinton's on-camera testimony during the Whitewater investigation. "We would like to see it limited to some specific questions about the heart of the probe – the Russian alleged collusion. We think that those questions could be answered quickly. We think two hours. They probably think four. So let's settle at three. That's the way you do a negotiation in good faith in this area. They have been in good faith."
However, Giuliani made clear that he wants to know more about the early stages of the FBI probe that became the Mueller investigation before agreeing to a sit-down. "I'm not sure we can possibly recommend being questioned until we know how badly is this investigation infected by what [Peter] Strzok did at the beginning," Giuliani said, referring to FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from the Mueller probe after the discovery of anti-Trump text messages he sent in 2016.
"We could get enough facts about what happened before to make a decision about this if we did have it," Giuliani said. "We'd like it to be over, basically."