The following article by Jack Holmes was posted on the Esquire website May 8, 2018:
During a four-hour practice with his legal team, Trump reportedly made it through two questions.
Credit: Getty Images
One particular source of angst for the attorneys of Donald J. Trump, American president, is the prospect of The Interview. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has requested a sit-down chat with the president to hear his side of things on whether he or his associates colluded with Russian officials during the 2016 election, and whether he obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey. Trump’s legal team is ever-changing, but no matter who’s on staff at the moment, they can’t seem to settle on whether he should be put in the same room with the granite-nosed investigator.
That ever-changing quality reared its head last week, when lead lawyer John Dowd and primary mustache Ty Cobb both departed the team. They were replaced by Emmet Flood—a powerful Washington defense attorney who has served as outside counsel to past presidents, including President Clinton during his impeachment proceedings—and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who seems to have undergone some changes in recent years.
Anyway, Giuliani is still at it, and could be found in Every Media Outlet once again Tuesday morning. First, he got on the horn with the folks at The Wall Street Journal to explain why “every day [the legal team] swings a little different” on whether Trump should sit for the interview. But there was a more intriguing passage in the report:
Another consideration is how Mr. Trump would perform as a witness and whether he has the discipline to avoid unnecessary tangents that open himself to new questions. “Anyone can see he has great difficulty staying on a subject,” one person familiar with the legal team’s deliberations said …
… Preparing Mr. Trump to testify would be a serious distraction to his work as president, eating into time he needs to deal with pressing global issues, Mr. Trump’s lawyers contend.
In an informal, four-hour practice session, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were only able to walk him through two questions, given the frequent interruptions on national-security matters along with Mr. Trump’s loquaciousness, one person familiar with the matter said.
There seems to be an effort here from the Journal‘s sources to cast Trump’s issues in the mock interview as borne of the many demands of his job. There’s probably some merit to that, though the case might be more compelling under a president who didn’t spend so much of his time live-tweeting Fox News.
In truth, the bread slices of this excuse sandwich are a little more convincing: that the president has trouble staying on topic and is liable to go off on a (possibly incriminating) rant. This was reinforced on one of Giuliani’s other stops on his press tour this morning, at CBS News:
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is now on President Trump’s legal team, told CBS News correspondent Paula Reid Monday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has rejected proposals to allow Mr. Trump to answer questions from investigators in writing.
The president’s legal team has signaled that this would be their preferred format for a possible interview, since it helps protect Mr. Trump from the possibility of lying or misleading investigators, which is a criminal offense.
Now that adds up. You need only look at Trump’s response to a question about the Stormy Daniels payment last week to see how effortlessly and instinctually he lies. It is something beyond second nature, and it’s not hard to imagine something false bursting from is lips as he sits across from Mueller before he even has a chance to consider whether it’s a good idea. When you add in that the questions Mueller submitted to Trump’s team—which were almost immediately leaked to the media—are ones to which the special prosecutor almost certainly already has the answers, the whole thing seems like an easy way for Trump to get caught lying to federal investigators under oath.