Jay Sekulow, one of President Trump’s personal lawyers, said Wednesday special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of federal prosecutors should not predicate a case against the president on an edited version of Trump’s interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt about fired former FBI Director James Comey.
“There’s actually a transcript of the entire Lester Holt interview,” Sekulow said on CNN. “And I will just tell you without disclosing any detail, that when you review the entire transcript, it is very clear as to what happened and I’m not going to give you information on how we provided it, but in our professional discussions with the office of special counsel, we have addressed that on multiple occasions appropriately.”
Sekulow, who is working with Rudy Giuliani to defend Trump amid Mueller’s federal Russia investigation, added he was not faulting NBC News for broadcasting the interview as the network did.
“But to turn that literally into a federal case we don’t think is right, we don’t think it’s constitutional, and we think the entire transcript without question supports the president realized when he fired James Comey it might actually extend this investigation and he said that on the tape,” Sekulow said.
Sekulow’s comments follow Trump in August blasting NBC News and Holt for “fudging” the “tape on Russia.”
What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks – with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2018
Trump told Holt in May 2017 that the FBI’s inquiry into connections between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin played a part in his calculus to dismiss Comey.
“And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story — it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won,'” Trump said.
The interview is speculated to be important to Mueller’s team as they try to ascertain Trump’s motive for ousting Comey. Motive is crucial to the investigation because Mueller’s office is also looking into whether the president obstructed justice by pushing out the former head of the FBI.
Mueller’s team and Trump’s attorneys are still discussing the parameters of a potential interview with the president.
