Giuliani: Trump legal team may try to block Mueller from releasing final report – By Justin Wise (thehill.com) / Sept 3 2018
President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani is claiming that the president’s legal team may invoke executive privilege to stop special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on the Russia investigation from being released to the public.
Giuliani told The New Yorker that it’s likely the Trump administration would object to the memo being made public information.
“I’m sure we will,” he said, before adding that Trump would make the final call on a decision like that.
Giuliani made the comments in reference to the impending report that Mueller will file to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the conclusion of his investigation into Russian election interference.
The New Yorker notes that Rosenstein will then have the ability to release the report to Congress and the public. But Giuliani has signaled that the president may move to stop that from happening – a development that could lead to a battle over whether Rosenstein is allowed to disclose the report.
Giuliani told The New Yorker that Trump’s original legal counsel struck a deal with the special counsel reserving the White House the right to object to the public disclosure of information covered by executive privilege.
He also told the magazine that the Trump team is planning to release a report of its own to refute Mueller’s findings.
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The comments are a part of a larger profile from the magazine on Giuliani’s work for the president.
It also comes days after Giuliani told the Daily Beast that Trump’s legal team is almost finished with a “voluminous” report aimed at discrediting Mueller.
“The first half of it is 58 pages, and second half isn’t done yet. … It needs an executive summary if it goes over a hundred,” Giuliani told the Beast.
Giuliani and Trump have consistently bashed the credibility of Mueller’s probe into Russia’s election interference and potential collusion between the Kremlin and the 2016 Trump campaign.
Trump has continually asserted that the investigation is a “witch hunt.”
