Rudy Giuliani said President Donald Trump's lawyers planned to send their latest letter to Mueller by Thursday. | Charles Krupa/AP Photo Obstruction questions still on table for Mueller-Trump interview, Giuliani says

President Donald Trump’s lawyers plan to send a letter to special counsel Robert Mueller later this week signaling they remain open to allowing the president to sit for an interview and be questioned about possible obstruction of justice, Rudy Giuliani said Tuesday.

“We’ll leave a little wiggle room,” Trump’s personal attorney said in an interview. “It’s not so much obstruction questions. It’s really sucker punches.”


A willingness to let the president address Mueller’s obstruction questions surrounding the firing of FBI Director James Comey marks a reversal for Giuliani from Monday, when the former New York mayor told The Washington Post that Trump’s lawyers had a “real reluctance about allowing any questions” on that topic.

“If he can demonstrate to us he’s got a couple questions on obstruction that he doesn’t have the answer to, that he really needs the answer to and he hasn’t made up his mind that Trump is lying, we might — we might — allow that,” Giuliani explained to POLITICO.

Giuliani said the president’s lawyers planned to send their latest letter to Mueller by Thursday — Giuliani will be with Trump that day at the president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey — detailing their limits for the long-sought interview. Trump’s legal team has repeatedly set dates, as far back as last Thanksgiving , for when such a high-level meeting could take place.

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On Tuesday, Giuliani said a decision remained more than a week away on Trump’s end on whether an interview with Mueller would even happen. He added that midterm campaign politics are now also a factor in the equation.

“I don’t think we want to put a date on it, but we want to get to the period of time where we don’t want to affect the 2018 election,” Giuliani said.

He added that if a decision could be reached quickly, the president and his lawyers could snap into action on the logistics for the meeting and in preparing Trump for the occasion. “If they agree to what we’re proposing, we can do this in about three weeks,” he said.

Giuliani told POLITICO in May that preparing the president for a Mueller interview — done in the same way that Trump readied for his 2016 campaign debates — would find a way onto the president’s summer schedule.

But he said Tuesday that those prep sessions hadn’t begun yet.

“Someone asked me if we’re preparing him,” Giuliani said. “We’re not. But over the course of the last three months, of course we’ve gone over these questions and gotten his answers.”