Rudy Giuliani, whose word has proven unreliable lately, tells The Daily Beast the president's team is writing up its own report to counter what it anticipates Special Counsel Robert Mueller may conclude and challenge the Russia investigation itself.
According to Giuliani, the bulk of the report will be divided into two sections. One section will seek to question the legitimacy of the Mueller probe generally by alleging “possible conflicts” of interest by federal law enforcement authorities. The other section will respond to more substantive allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russian government agents to sway the 2016 election, and obstruction of justice allegations stemming from, among other things, the president’s firing of former FBI director James Comey.
Though this latter section will focus on the meat of Mueller’s investigation, Giuliani acknowledged that he doesn’t actually know what Mueller’s findings will look like, making the act of putting a counter-report together a bit more challenging.
“Since we have to guess what it is, [our report so far] is quite voluminous,” Giuliani said, claiming that he would spend much of this weekend “paring it down” and that he was editing the document created by the “whole team.”
“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,” he added. Giuliani also indicated that most of what’s being put together by him and his Trump-defending colleagues currently can already be found on Google.
Giuliani says the president's legal team isn't conducting any original interviews or doing any investigative research of its own, making the counter-report nothing more than a personal opinion document.
“I don’t think there's anything in it that isn't publicly available in some form or another,” he continued. “There is no [secret] grand jury material here…It'll be our report, put out on...personal stationary, and it would be in response to their report…We may have to use it in court, or [send to] Congress.”
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Glenn Kirschner, a retired federal prosecutor in Washington D.C. said it was highly unusual for a rebuttal report to be authored by lawyers for potential subjects of an investigation. It was virtually unheard of for it to be put together prior to the investigation’s findings being made public.
“This sounds to me like pure PR nonsense,” Kirschner assessed. “They are making an announcement that they will issue a rebuttal to a report that we don’t know when it is coming out or what it will contain.”
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The Trump team’s counter-report has been in the works since late July. Giuliani briefly mentioned the “report” in a tweet earlier this month, but little information about the actual document has been reported since.
Giuliani says Trump knows about the report and is happy with the strategic decision to write it.
Among those working on it are Giuliani and fellow Trump attorney Jay Sekulow along with their colleague on Trump’s legal team, Marty Raskin. Sekulow would only tell The Daily Beast that the president’s legal team is “preparing a comprehensive report that will include issues related to the commencement of this investigation through the legal issues of it.” A number of attorneys who work with Sekulow at his nonprofit legal group, the American Center for Law and Justice, are assisting with the report, though they are not doing so in their capacity as ACLJ employees, and the organization is not involved in its formation.
The report's original due date was September 1st, but now it looks like it won't be done for another two or three weeks. It also may get sidelined if something more pressing emerges.
“It may all be for naught,” Giuliani said, “because they may subpoena [the president], and then we'd have to turn our attention to fighting the subpoena.”
Rudy Giuliani is Putting Together a 'Counter-Report’ to Question Robert Mueller’s ‘Legitimacy’ (The Daily Beast)