Byron York: In subpoena fight, Trump lawyer told Mueller: 'You want to do it, you've got yourself a war'
by Byron York
| March 28, 2019 10:30 PM
Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller completed his investigation without ever interviewing President Trump. The two sides wrangled over the issue for much of the Mueller investigation before Trump finally agreed to answer questions in writing. Now, in a new podcast interview, a former lawyer for the president, John Dowd, said the wrangling became so contentious that he threatened Mueller with "war" if the special counsel subpoenaed the president.
Dowd, who was Trump's lawyer from June 2017 to March 2018, said Mueller was hampered by two daunting problems. The first was that Mueller could not establish that a crime had occurred — that there had been conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to fix the 2016 election. Indeed, the Mueller report, as quoted in Attorney General William Barr's summary of its findings, said "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" and "the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference."
Mueller's second problem, as Dowd and the Trump team saw it, was that precedent from a Clinton-era independent counsel investigation, the Mike Espy case, held that to overcome a presidential claim of privilege, a prosecutor had to show that the president's testimony would provide evidence that was directly relevant to a criminal matter, and that that evidence was not available from any other source. Dowd argued that the White House had cooperated so extensively with Mueller, had provided him so much material that helped explain the president's actions, including contemporaneous accounts of what Trump said in private conversations, that Mueller could not effectively claim that he had no other source of information.
Get educated..take your mouths off the mainstream sewer pipe and learn something truthful.