Pres. Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow says if special counsel Robert Mueller were to subpoena Trump to testify in the Russia investigation, it would spark a legal battle that would go to the Supreme Court https://t.co/CVDPt82gep #ThisWeek pic.twitter.com/g2PeApRRwO
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 5, 2018
President Donald Trump‘s lawyer Jay Sekulow said Sunday that a big court battle will likely ensue if Special Counsel Robert Mueller subpoenas the president.
“If you get a subpoena, you file what’s called a motion to quash,” Sekulow said on ABC’s This Week. “That will be argued at the District Court, then it would go to the Court of Appeals, then it would go to the Supreme Court of the United States. From the Supreme Court of the United States, it goes back down to the lower courts again.”
Sekulow clarified this was a hypothetical. The Trump team wouldn’t know if a subpoena was about to be filed, he said. This, however, has been a recurring question amid Mueller’s Russia probe. The investigation is looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Kremlin interference in the 2016 election. Mueller is also reportedly looking into whether the president committed obstruction of justice by telling fired FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and for firing Comey amid the Russia probe, which was then in the hands of the FBI.
Trump continues to balk at doing a sit-down interview with Mueller’s team. POTUS’ lawyers and allies recommend that he not do it, and the Trump team is likely to argue that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t give the special counsel the authority to seek that subpoena.
“A subpoena for live testimony has never been tested in court as to a president of the United States, and there is a lot of language, articles, and precedents against that,” Sekulow argued.
This interview comes the same morning that Trump downplayed his son’s infamous 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer to get dirt on Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.
“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere,” Trump tweeted. “I did not know about it!” Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen reportedly claimed that Trump knew about and approved of the meeting ahead of time.
Some reporters argued that the president admitted to attempted collusion by his campaign in this tweet.
[Screengrab via ABC]
