Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, was greeted like a conquering hero when he arrived in the atrium of the Trump International Hotel on Thursday evening, hours after the publication of the long-awaited Mueller report.
Well-wishers cheered and clapped before he disappeared upstairs for dinner.
As the fallout from special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report reverberated through Washington a day later, allies of the president praised Giuliani’s legal strategy for ensuring President Trump was not among the hundreds of witnesses who sat down with investigators.
A former campaign and administration official said Giuliani had stayed one step ahead of prosecutors, who, in the view of Trump allies, were never going to be able to prove collusion and whose only hope was to catch the president lying to prosecutors.
“Under those circumstances it would have been suicidal to let him be interviewed by those Jihadis in Mueller’s office,” the former official said.
A day earlier, Trump claimed victory after publication of the Mueller report, which concluded there had been no collusion with Russia and that there was insufficient evidence to pursue allegations of obstruction of justice.
Supporters praised the president’s legal team for insulating Trump from the risks of a sit-down interview with the special counsel and his investigators. Rather than risk intense face-to-face questioning over what the report said were 10 instances of possible obstruction, his team submitted written answers to the Mueller team’s questions instead.
“Thank God his lawyers didn’t let him. … That’s a perjury trap,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., one of the president’s most outspoken supporters in Congress, told MSNBC on Friday.
Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a former campaign aide, offered cautionary examples. Both had to plead guilty to lying to the FBI.
To shield a president known for his loose relationship with the truth, his team had adopted a two-pronged strategy.
In public, Giuliani used pugilistic attacks on the special counsel’s “witch hunt.”
“He gave as good as he got,” said Sebastian Gorka, who served as deputy assistant to the president during 2017. “Almost as pugnacious as the president, which is the key to survival in a swamp where vested interests on both sides are out to take the president down.”
In private, they stonewalled efforts to bring the president in to speak to investigators, despite Trump’s repeated public offers to meet.
The lawyerly language of the report hints at the investigators’ frustration at being unable to interview the president.
“We also sought a voluntary interview with the president,” they stated. “After more than a year of discussion, the President declined to be interviewed.”
Rather than engage in a lengthy legal battle to compel Trump to testify, they opted to accept written responses, they explained, but these proved insufficient.
“We noted, among other things, that the president stated on more than 30 occasions that he ‘does not recall’ or ‘remember’ or have an ‘independent recollection’ of information called for by the questions,” the report said. “Other answers were incomplete or imprecise.”
Areva Martin, an attorney and legal commentator, said written exchanges meant Mueller gave up the ability to probe deeper into Trump’s answers.
“What he got were the lawyer’s responses,” she said.
In addition, she questioned why the special counsel, charged with probing such serious allegations of Russian interference, apparently balked at the prospect of pursuing time-consuming legal action to compel the president to answer questions face-to-face: “What was Mueller thinking?”
That would now form one of the questions for Congress to examine, she said.
