TRS Staff

This week, President Donald Trump answered questions given to him by White House Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, but reportedly stopped short of answering inquiries into his behavior as commander-in-chief. His lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, stated that the President, in the future, will refuse to cooperate with the Russia probe, even if he is subpoenaed.

“I think that he would not win a legal battle if he did that,” Giuliani said about Mueller, adding that “ I think it would consumer months,” he told Axios.

The questionnaire sent to President Trump “looked like a law school exam,” Giuliani said, explaining that White House lawyers sat with the President in the Oval Office, at the dinner table, and wherever else they could work on crafting official answers to Mueller’s questions.

Reportedly, Mueller pressed President Trump in asking if he knew about the meeting between his son and what was thought to be a Russian with knowledge about then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower in 2017, and broadly inquiring about the situation of then-candidate Trump saying at a campaign press conference in July 2016, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing.”

Giuliani told reporters this week that the questions sent to the White House to be answered are “all very circumspect.”

The former prosecuting attorney went on to explain that he does not believe that the special counsel “has any way to compel testimony on obstruction because the argument of executive privilege would be very, very strong.” He added, “[A]ny question he has on obstruction…[t]he president has given [the answers] in interviews, tweets. Other witnesses have given it to him.”

Giuliani, who has advocated to end the investigation in the past, said “the law definitely requires that if you’re going to subpoena a president, you have to show that you can’t get the information any place else,” adding there is no evidence of collusion between the Russia government and the Trump campaign team. The heavyweight on Trump’s legal defense team also expressed doubt that the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., would be indicted over his connection with the case in the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting.

“The meeting turned out to be a big bust,” Giuliani said.

Vice President Mike Pence gave Russian President Vladimir Putin a nasty stare as they met to shake hands at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Singapore last week, reportedly telling the authoritarian leader not to interfere in U.S. elections. The meeting between the two comes just weeks before the G20 Summit at the end of November set in Buenos Aries, Argentina.

In late July, the most concise implication against the Russian government surfaced as the Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers with hacking into the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The illegal hacking is said to have released tens of thousands of communications in a sweeping effort by a Moscow to meddle in the election.

As White Special Counsel Robert Mueller is set to wrap up the now-18-month-long investigation into Russian election interference, lawmakers in Washington are now up in arms about the presumed pick for head of Interpol Russian Police Major General Aleksandr Prokopchuk in a time when most of the world is weary of Putin’s Kremlin.

AP reports that Pence’s press secretary, Alyssa Farah, said in a statement that the two “touched on the issues that will be discussed when President Trump and President Putin are both in Argentina.”

Nevertheless, one issue that is to come up is President Donald Trump’s presumed departure from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that kickstarted the arms reduction in the latter years of the Cold War. The Russian president reiterated at the ASEAN Summit to Vice President Pence that Moscow and Washington need to discuss the future of the INF treaty and also the 2011 New START arms-reduction agreement which put central limits on strategic arms between the U.S. and the Russian Federation.

While the treaty eliminated all short and intermediate-range nuclear and conventional missiles, as well as their test launches, it did not regulate sea-launched missiles.