ABC News(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s top personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said he can’t rule out the possibility of the president taking the Fifth Amendment if he testifies in the Russia investigation.
“How could I ever be confident” that the president won’t take the Fifth Amendment, Giuliani said to ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview on This Week on Sunday.
The former New York City mayor also commented on the possibility of Trump getting subpoenaed by the special counsel to testify. “We don’t have to comply with a subpoena,” he said.
“They don’t have a case on collusion. They don’t have obstruction,” he said, adding, “I’m going to walk him into a prosecution for perjury like Martha Stewart did? He’s the president of the United States.”
Giuliani said, “I have a client who wants to testify. … So he may testify, and we may actually work things out with Bob Mueller.”
But the president’s lawyer also suggested he is cautious about having Trump sit down with Mueller. “Not after the way they’ve acted,” Giuliani said of the special counsel’s team. He said he joined the case with a desire to have the president talk to Mueller, but “they just keep convincing me not to do it.”
Trump said on Friday that he would “love to speak” to Mueller, but would only do it on the condition he is “treated fairly.”
Giuliani also told Stephanopoulos on This Week that he expects Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.
But Giuliani suggested he has no concerns about anything Cohen could say.
“Michael Cohen doesn’t have any incriminating evidence on the president or himself,” Giuliani said. “He’s an honest, honorable lawyer.”
Giuliani’s, who’s only been on the job for two weeks, got off to what seemed like a possibly rocky start with the president.
Earlier last week, Giuliani made waves when he told Fox’s Sean Hannity that Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey because “Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation.”
“He’s entitled to that,” Giuliani said to Hannity, adding, “So he fired him.”
Trump appeared to push back on Giuliani’s language on Friday, telling reporters that “Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago.”
“He’s working hard learning the subject matter,” Trump said.
President Trump said Friday that he fired Comey because of reasons laid out in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo that was critical of Comey’s handling of the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Mueller has expressed interest in probing the president on the circumstances surrounding Comey’s firing.
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