Trump Says He Is Willing to Speak Under Oath to Mueller
January 26, 2018 by admin
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The president’s surprise exchange with about 20 reporters served as a reminder of the extent to which Mr. Trump sees the Russia inquiry as simply an invalidation of his electoral victory, and feels a deep sense of bitterness about the narrative surrounding his presidency.
His lawyers have been negotiating for weeks with Mr. Mueller’s team about the prospect of having him answer questions in the inquiry, including what topics would be covered. Mr. Trump said last year he would be willing to speak with Mr. Mueller, but he has more recently suggested that should not be necessary because the allegations being examined were baseless.
While there are risks for the president submitting to such an interview, some senior White House officials have argued that Mr. Trump should do so in the interest of bringing a swift end to an investigation that has cast a shadow over his presidency. People familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking have long described private conversations with the president in which he has said he is eager to meet with Mr. Mueller, a product of his belief that he can sell or coax almost anyone into seeing things his way.
“I would love to do that — I’d like to do it as soon as possible,” the president told reporters on Wednesday of the prospect of being interviewed by Mr. Mueller, adding that his lawyers have told him it would be “about two to three weeks” until it takes place. Almost as an afterthought, he added, any such interview would be “subject to my lawyers, and all of that.”
Many of the potential questions relate to whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice, people briefed on the discussions have said. They have said they expect the interview to be completed by the end of February or early March.
Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer leading the response to the investigation, said Mr. Trump was speaking hurriedly and intended only to say that he was willing to meet.
“He’s ready to meet with them, but he’ll be guided by the advice of his personal counsel,” Mr. Cobb said. He said the arrangements were being worked out between Mr. Mueller’s team and the president’s personal lawyers.
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The White House has made many witnesses available for interviews with prosecutors, and officials have said there are no discussions about Mr. Trump speaking before a grand jury, which is how prosecutors speak to witnesses under oath. Interviews with agents and prosecutors are not conducted under oath, but lying to the F.B.I. is a felony.
Pressed on whether he would be willing to answer questions under oath, Mr. Trump first asked a reporter whether Hillary Clinton, his 2016 campaign rival, had done so in the investigation into her use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton gave a voluntary interview to F.B.I. investigators in July 2016, and was not under oath, as is typical for such sessions.
President Bill Clinton testified under oath in 1998 about his relationship with a White House intern. He was questioned on camera in the White House Map Room, and the testimony was broadcast to a Washington grand jury room.
Mr. Trump spoke with reporters in the doorway of his chief of staff’s office, interrupting a background briefing with a senior administration official on immigration with his own roughly one-minute informal news conference before he departed for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Mr. Trump also said that he did not recall questioning Andrew G. McCabe, the deputy F.B.I. director, during a job interview about how he voted in the 2016 presidential election, after White House officials conceded on Tuesday that the president had, in fact, asked the question.
“I don’t think so; no, I don’t think I did,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I don’t know what’s the big deal with that.”
Mr. Trump continued, “I don’t remember asking him the question. I think it’s also a very unimportant question.” The two met after the president fired the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, as Mr. Trump was deciding whether he would name Mr. McCabe the acting director of the bureau. Mr. Trump’s query was an unusual and overtly political one for a discussion with a senior official in the Justice Department, which is supposed to be independent of political influence.
But Mr. Trump appeared to concede that he was concerned about Mr. McCabe’s political affiliation, noting that his wife ran for office in Virginia in 2015 with political support from Terry McAuliffe, a close ally of the Clintons.
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“The wife got $500 from Terry,” Mr. Trump said. “Terry is Hillary.”
As he wrapped up the session, the president asked one TV reporter to make sure she aired a “nice piece” about him, expressing his frustration that journalists do not acknowledge his strength as a candidate.
“There’s no collusion,” Mr. Trump said as he left. “I couldn’t have cared less about Russians having to do with my campaign.”
“The fact is, you people won’t say this, but I’ll say it: I was a much better candidate than her,” the president went on, referring to Mrs. Clinton. “You always say she was a bad candidate; you never say I was a good candidate. I was one of the greatest candidates.”
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Trump, in Davos, Hopes to Sell the Story of US Success
January 26, 2018 by admin
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Mr. Trump will discuss those differences when he gives his much-anticipated speech on Friday, but advisers said the plan was not to be belligerent. Instead, they said, he would reaffirm that he believed in robust trade, but that it had to be fair, and that the United States had not been treated well by its partners. And they said he would push for foreign investment in the United States, touting his success at lowering corporate taxes and rolling back business regulations.
“The agenda is going to be, again, that the U.S. is open for business, that the new tax law, tax cuts act, makes investing in the United States very attractive,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Still, the administration has spoken with different voices on that this week. While Mr. Mnuchin has sought to emphasize potential areas of agreement, Wilbur L. Ross, the commerce secretary, has more defiantly said that the United States was ready to wage trade wars.
At a briefing on Wednesday, he said that other countries had been waging trade wars against America for some time. “The difference is, the U.S. troops are now coming to the ramparts,” he said.
At another briefing, on Thursday, he toned that down a bit, saying the Trump administration was not seeking a trade war, but “we’re not flinching from that” either.
“We are the least protectionist country, regardless of the rhetoric that other people put,” he said. “We would like their behavior to match their rhetoric.”
Despite the doctrinal differences, Mr. Trump arrives with a bit of momentum, having pushed through $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, mainly for corporations, and presiding over a growing economy that is nearing full employment. Many business leaders at Davos, while still rolling their eyes at a president they consider erratic and ill informed, are nonetheless happy with his business-friendly policies and they anticipate more economic growth to come.
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Mr. Trump planned to host European chief executives for dinner on Thursday, to sell them on investing in the United States. He also planned to meet with Prime Ministers Theresa May of Britain and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
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Those two meetings should showcase the wide disparity in Mr. Trump’s relations with longtime American allies. He and Mrs. May have quarreled on several occasions during his year in office, most recently over anti-Muslim videos from a far-right British group that Mr. Trump retweeted, and the president recently canceled a planned visit to London to open a new embassy building there.
Mr. Mnuchin said the so-called special relationship between the United States and Britain remained undiminished. “I do think we’ve had a very special economic relationship for a long period of time, and we would expect that to continue,” he said.
“I think we’ve been very clearly supportive of the U.K. on the Brexit issues,” he added, referring to Britain’s departure from the European Union, adding that and as soon as London was ready, the Trump administration would negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with the country.
Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, could hardly be happier with Mr. Trump, who recently discarded decades of American policy to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and who has threatened to pull out of a nuclear deal with Iran that the Israeli leader despises. Vice President Mike Pence, during a visit to Israel this week, announced that the United States Embassy would move to Jerusalem in 2019. It would be the only foreign embassy in the disputed city, which Palestinians consider the capital of their future state.
Even leaders with grievances against the Trump administration seemed intent on putting aside their differences and playing up to him. Mr. Trump said this month that he would suspend almost all security aid to Pakistan for what he described as the country’s “lies and death,” notably its policies in Afghanistan.
Yet, at a dawn breakfast here on Thursday, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan described in warm terms his brief meeting with Mr. Trump in September in New York, at a reception during the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly.
“I found him to be a different person from his public persona,” Mr. Abbasi said. “He is a very warm person, and he engaged me.”
Drawing a laugh from the audience, Mr. Abbasi added, “We had a frank discussion for about two minutes.”
Another leader recalled meeting Mr. Trump on the same occasion. “He is charming to me at least,” President Michel Temer of Brazil said in an interview with The New York Times. “As soon as he came in the room, he hugged me, he gave me a brotherly hug. He wanted to take a picture with me. He had been well briefed on Brazil.”
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