President Trump today said he has answered a set of questions from special counsel Robert Mueller “very easily,” and his lawyers are signaling that the president expects to turn over his written answers in the coming days.
Trump stressed that he has been “busy” and it has taken some time to complete the answers, but he also expressed his concern about Mueller’s purpose in obtaining them.
“You always have to be careful answering questions for people who probably have bad intentions,” he said of the team Mueller has assembled to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any possible coordination with Trump’s campaign. “I haven’t submitted them. I just finished them.”
The president’s comments, which he made to reporters gathered in the Oval Office for a bill signing, came after his lawyers surprisingly postponed submitting the answers as they had planned to on Thursday.
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, told The Washington Post that the legal team was still deciding whether some of Mueller’s questions they agreed to answer in September would cause legal problems for the president.
Trump stressed Friday that he answered the questions personally, not his lawyers.
“My lawyers aren’t working on it. I’m working on it,” Trump said. “My lawyers don’t write the answers.”
Trump then acknowledged this his attorney’s have been looking over his answers.
Trump has met with lawyers nearly every day this week in sessions to review his answers, including a four-hour session Wednesday that was frequently interrupted by other business.
Trump spent more than four hours meeting with his attorneys Monday, broken up by phone calls the president had to take, and 90 minutes Wednesday night, according to people familiar with the sessions.
Trump also was asked Friday about his recent tweets, which seemed to betray a sense of frustration, where he called the Mueller probe “illegal” and said, without evidence, that Mueller’s team was “screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”
“I’m not agitated,” he said Friday. “It’s a hoax.”
It isn’t clear now whether, when Trump submits his written answers to the special counsel’s office, that will end the discussion or Mueller might still want to hear from the president in person.