A Mueller mystery: How Trump dodged a special counsel interview -- and a subpoena fight
It was March 2018, nearly 10 months into his Russia investigation, when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a man of few words, raised the stakes dramatically in a meeting with President Trump’s lawyers: If the president did not sit down voluntarily for an interview, he could face a subpoena.
In the months that followed, Mueller never explicitly threatened to issue a subpoena as his office pursued a presidential interview, a sit-down for which the special counsel was pushing as late as December.
But with that prospect hanging over them, Trump’s legal advisers conducted a quiet, multipronged pressure campaign to avert such an action and keep the president from coming face-to-face with federal investigators — fearful he would perjure himself.
At one point last summer, when a lull in talks had the president’s attorneys worried that Mueller was seriously contemplating a subpoena, White House lawyer Emmet Flood wrote a memo laying out the legal arguments for protecting the president’s executive privilege. He sent the document to Mueller’s office and to the deputy for top Justice Department official Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversaw the probe, according to two people familiar with Flood’s outreach.
Meanwhile, the Trump lawyers sent a steady stream of documents and witnesses to the special counsel, chipping away at Mueller’s justification for needing an interview with the president.
In the end, the decision not to subpoena the president is one of the lingering mysteries of Mueller’s 22-month investigation, which concluded last week when he filed a report numbering more than 300 pages.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-mueller-mystery-how-trump-dodged-a-special-counsel-interview--and-a-subpoena-fight/2019/03/28/5949b186-50b7-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html?utm_term=.e460017f43d0&wpisrc=al_news__alert-politics--alert-national&wpmk=1
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