WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation (all times local): 8:55 a.m. President Donald…
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation (all times local):
8:55 a.m.
President Donald Trump’s attorney says his legal team would go to court to prevent any effort to subpoena the president.
Rudy Giuliani appeared on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, a day after it was revealed that Trump’s lawyers wrote a secret 20-page letter to special counsel Robert Mueller arguing that the president can’t be compelled to testify in front of a grand jury.
Giuliani says they would contest it if Mueller tried.
But the former New York City mayor suggested that he did not entirely agree with the letter’s premise that a president could never be charged with obstruction of justice.
He stressed, though, that Trump had done nothing wrong. And he said the legal team was leaning against having Trump be interviewed by Mueller’s investigators.
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12:35 a.m.
President Donald Trump’s lawyers have made a bold assertion of presidential power. They’ve sent a 20-page letter to special counsel Robert Mueller that asserts Trump cannot be forced to testify in Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Trump’s legal team also argues that the president could not have committed obstruction because, they say, he has absolute authority over all federal investigations.
The existence of the letter composed in January was first reported and posted by The New York Times on Saturday.
It’s another front on which Trump’s lawyers are trying to make the case that the president can’t be subpoenaed in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U. S. election.
The lawyers contend in their January letter that the Constitution empowers the president to, “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.”
