Giuliani steps up attacks on probe; Mueller inquiry ‘rigged,’ illegitimate, Trump lawyer says

In this May 5, 2018, file photo, Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Donald Trump, speaks at the Iran Freedom Convention for Human Rights and democracy in Washington.
In this May 5, 2018, file photo, Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Donald Trump, speaks at the Iran Freedom Convention for Human Rights and democracy in Washington.

WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump's lawyer again questioned the legitimacy of special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, even as a possible interview between Mueller and the president looms.

"We're more convinced as we see it that this is a rigged investigation," Rudy Giuliani said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union. Asked if he sees the probe as legitimate, Giuliani, who joined Trump's legal team in mid-April, replied: "Not anymore. I don't. I did when it came in."

The former New York mayor is seeking a readout of the classified information Justice Department officials shared with lawmakers on Thursday about the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian meddling. Trump has made an unsubstantiated claim that an informant who contacted advisers to his 2016 campaign was a political "spy."

"It should be very easy to brief us," Giuliani said. "The White House has every right to know, the president has every right to know as commander in chief."

Giuliani has taken those claims further, arguing in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday that what Trump has dubbed "Spygate" might make Mueller's investigation illegitimate. He also said former FBI Director James Comey was guilty of an illegal leak when he directed a friend to share the contents of memos about his interactions with Trump to the media in May 2017, which led to bipartisan calls for a special counsel in the Russia probe.

"The whole thing was a mistake and should never have happened," Giuliani told the AP, adding that the Justice Department should acknowledge the error.

Giuliani said Sunday that he doesn't believe the alleged informant was being protected, calling the FBI and Justice "a little hypocritical."

Whether Trump will agree to be interviewed as part of the probe remains uncertain. Giuliani said the president's legal team would wait until seeing a report on the substance of information with lawmakers, shared in two separate meetings. Previously he said a decision wouldn't be made until after the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. Trump canceled that meeting Thursday, but it may still take place.

"If they don't show us these documents, well, we are just going to have to say no," Giuliani said. It's unclear, however, if Trump would heed his lawyers' advice.

Justice Department officials didn't immediately return a message seeking comment on whether the president had requested a briefing similar to what was provided to members of Congress last week.

In a separate television appearance, Giuliani said Trump was "adamant" about wanting to agree to an interview, saying, "If he wasn't thinking about it and it wasn't an active possibility, we would be finished with that by now and we would have moved on to getting the investigation over with another way."

Giuliani also raised the specter of a protracted legal fight over the question of a Trump interview if Mueller decided to seek a subpoena.

"What we have to do is go to court and seek protection from the court, if we have to do that. Our first thing is we sure as heck are not going to testify unless it's all straightened out, unless we learned the basis of that Russian investigation," Giuliani told Fox News Sunday.

Giuliani said Trump's lawyers would fight such a subpoena all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.

"I think we win it," he said.

Giuliani also downplayed the chances that Trump would fire Mueller, a Republican who once was FBI director and has served under GOP presidents. Asked if Trump would dismiss anyone if the investigation kept going, Giuliani told Fox that firings would play "into the hands of playing the victim, Watergate."

'PROPAGANDA MACHINE'

The briefings of lawmakers came in response to Trump's demand to fully investigate the use of the confidential informant, which he called in a tweet "one of the biggest political scandals in history."

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., subpoenaed the Justice Department and the FBI for classified information about the informant. Top congressional Democrats have argued that Republicans want to use the information to undermine the Russia investigation.

On Thursday, two meetings were held with lawmakers to resolve issues around the documents. Nunes; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.; House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.; and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, met at the White House.

After the meeting, Ryan said Republicans are now "getting the cooperation necessary" to resolve their demands for classified information.

A second meeting, on Capitol Hill, was held with members of the "Gang of Eight," the top leadership of both parties in the House and Senate plus the top Republicans and Democrats on the intelligence committees. Ryan didn't attend that meeting.

"Nothing we heard today has changed our view that there is no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a 'spy' in the Trump Campaign," the Democrats at the second meeting said in a joint statement. That group is made up of Schiff; Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; and Sen. Mark Warner,D-Va., and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Democrats also objected vehemently to White House lawyer Emmet Flood showing up for part of the closed meeting. Flood, Schiff said on Sunday, "had no business being there."

"The whole purpose of this meeting had nothing to do with congressional oversight," the Democrat said. "It was to help the president's defense by getting information improperly from the Justice Department to feed to the president's lawyers."

He also pointed to Giuliani's push for a separate Justice Department briefing about the confidential informant.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the leader of the House Freedom Caucus, also suggested Sunday in an appearance on CBS News' Face the Nation that House Republicans would not relent in their quest to see the documents related to the informant and are "hopeful that will happen in the coming days."

But not all Republicans are convinced that Nunes, Meadows and other GOP lawmakers are on a legitimate quest.

"I have seen no evidence that those people were part of an investigation on the campaign," Senate Intelligence Committee member Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Sunday on ABC News' This Week, calling the contacts the informant made with Trump campaign advisers such as George Papadopoulos and Carter Page "appropriate, if that's all that happened."

But Rubio added that "if there is an FBI informant or any form of inappropriate action that's been targeting a political campaign ... we want to know about it and it should be punished."

Schiff, appearing later in the show, dismissed Rubio's caveat as "part of the propaganda machine."

"Let's spread a completely fallacious story and then let's say that it needs to be investigated and give it a life of its own," Schiff said.

Information for this article was contributed by Nafeesa Syeed, Bill Allison and Terrence Dopp of Bloomberg news; by staff members of The Associated Press; and by Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post.

photo

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, walks past the media as he arrives for a House GOP Conference meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 28, 2017.

A Section on 05/28/2018

Upcoming Events