US President Donald Trump's legal team would advise that he refuse to submit to an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller unless the team can review classified information shared with select politicians about the origins of the FBI investigation into Russia's election meddling, Trump's personal lawyer says.
Rudy Giuliani said that should Mueller's investigators seek a court order to compel the president to testify, Trump's lawyers would fight such a subpoena all the way to the US Supreme Court, if necessary.
"I think we win it," Giuliani said on Sunday.
Giuliani downplayed the chances that Trump would fire Mueller, a Republican who once was FBI director and has served under GOP presidents. Asked if Trump would dismiss anyone if the investigation kept going, Giuliani told Fox News Sunday that firings would play "into the hands of playing the victim, Watergate".
Giuliani's public negotiation over terms of an interview focuses on the use of a government informant who approached members of Trump's 2016 campaign in a possible bid to glean intelligence on Russian efforts to sway his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Trump has made unproven claims of FBI misconduct and political bias and has denounced the informant, without evidence, as "a spy".
The two meetings with select lawmakers, held last Thursday, were requested by Trump's GOP allies in congress and arranged by the White House. After the meetings, Democrats said they saw no evidence to support Republican allegations that the FBI acted inappropriately.
Nonetheless, Giuliani said the Trump camp wants access to the material presented at those briefings to help prepare the president for a possible interview with Mueller.
"If they don't show us these documents, well, we are just going to have to say no," Giuliani said. It's unclear, however, if Trump would heed his lawyers' advice.
In a separate television appearance, Giuliani said Trump was "adamant" about wanting to agree to an interview, saying, "If he wasn't thinking about it and it wasn't an active possibility, we would be finished with that by now and we would have moved on to getting the investigation over with another way."
The new wrinkle, he said, is the disclosure about the informant.
"We are more convinced, as we see it, that this is a rigged investigation. Now we have this whole new 'Spygate' thing thrown on top of it, on top of already very legitimate questions," he told CNN's State of the Union.
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