Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA
I see that President Trump has a shiny new excuse for not talking to Robert Mueller:
President Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said Tuesday that Trump will not agree to an interview with the special counsel until prosecutors allow the president’s legal team to review documents related to the FBI’s use of a source to interact with members of Trump’s 2016 campaign….Giuliani has previously said that Trump has done nothing improper and is eager to talk to Mueller. On Tuesday, though, he said, he doesn’t want to make a call on whether Trump will sit down for an interview “until they decide whether they are going to give us the documents or not.”
This is like a mafia don refusing to talk unless the FBI turns over everything they have on the informants who have already cooperated. This is, I’m pretty sure, not standard procedure.
At this point, I’m genuinely curious why Mueller keeps putting up with this. Why not just subpoena Trump to testify in front of a grand jury and be done with it? Is he trying to show that he made every possible effort to procure voluntary cooperation first? It’s been months now, and it’s pretty obvious that Trump is never going to agree to an interview. What’s the downside of a subpoena?
