Rudy Giuliani said he does not believe special counsel Robert Mueller’s team can subpoena the president and require him to speak to investigators. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images Trump team tries new tactics to discredit Mueller As Mueller's probe reaches the one-year mark, Giuliani claims the special counsel can't indict Trump.

President Donald Trump and his allies ramped up their pressure campaign against special counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday — the one-year anniversary of his sprawling investigation — as they seek to discredit the probe that shows no signs of wrapping up soon.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who joined Trump’s legal team last month, did multiple TV interviews in which he claimed Mueller’s team had informed Trump’s lawyers that it has concluded the special counsel cannot indict a sitting president.


There was no independent verification that such an assurance was given, and it comes as Giuliani has repeatedly tried to box in Mueller and to publicly negotiate the terms of a potential sit-down interview between the special counsel and Trump.

“I asked him specifically if they realized or acknowledged they didn't have the power to indict. Both under the Justice Department memo, which gives them their power, in essence confines their power, and under the Constitution,” Giuliani told “Fox & Friends.” “One of his assistants said they acknowledged they had to be bound by Justice Department policies. Then the next day or the day after, they clarified it for [Trump attorney] Jay Sekulow who was with me at the meeting that they didn't have the power to indict.”

Mueller's office declined to comment on whether it could indict the president.

Trump himself argued on Twitter that it’s time to wrap up what he called “the greatest Witch Hunt in American History."

He and his allies also seized on reporting and speculation that the FBI used informants or other sources to monitor the Trump campaign — an apparent attempt to discredit the genesis of the now-far-flung probe.

“Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI “SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT,” Trump tweeted, going on to reference a National Review column. “Andrew McCarthy says, ‘There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.’ If so, this is bigger than Watergate!”

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Thursday marks one year since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller, giving new firepower to an existing probe that has bedeviled the president through the majority of his time in office. While Trump’s legal team has repeatedly shuffled its membership, it has consistently called for a swift end to Mueller’s probe, as have other Trump allies.

Despite assertions by Trump's team that the Mueller probe has proven to be fruitless, the investigation has secured multiple indictments and shows no outward signs of winding down. Among those indicted by Mueller's team are former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, as well as campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and 13 Russian nationals accused of participating in the Kremlin's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Mueller's team also secured a guilty plea last year from Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is cooperating with the probe, as are Papadopoulos and Gates.

Giuliani, appearing on Fox News for the second time in 12 hours, said Thursday morning that Mueller’s team told him the investigation would eventually produce a “memorandum and give it to the deputy attorney general,” who is overseeing the probe with the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from all matters related to the 2016 campaign.

On the revelation of a government informant speaking to individuals inside the Trump campaign — which was included in a New York Times report published on Wednesday — Giuliani suggested the president's legal team would look into getting the entire Mueller investigation thrown out because the Justice Department put “a spy in the campaign of a major-party candidate.”

Beyond Giuliani's appearance on Fox News, other Trump surrogates made the TV news rounds Thursday morning to mark the occasion of the Mueller probe's one-year anniversary by bashing it. Michael Caputo, a former senior adviser to the Trump campaign, predicted on CNN that Mueller's team would next try to "jam" Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser and confidant known for incendiary and sometimes conspiratorial claims. Probes into Trump's campaign date back much further than just one year, he suggested to "New Day" host Chris Cuomo.

"This isn’t the one-year anniversary of the Mueller investigation. This is two-, or three-, or six-year anniversary. Paul Manafort was under investigation for years before he went to work for Trump," Caputo said.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, too, appeared on "Fox & Friends" Thursday morning, reiterating her usual praise for the president's use of social media to communicate his feelings on the Mueller probe while also pushing the idea that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign.

"It looks like the Trump campaign may in fact have been surveiled. It looks like there was an informant there. We'll see, as the president likes to say, we'll see what happens," she said. "But I think those who have been digging and conjecturing for over a year, should be careful what they wish for."

A key question remaining for Mueller's probe is whether it will have the opportunity to interview the president. While Trump has said publicly that he would like to sit for an interview with Mueller’s team, whether he will actually do so remains an open question. Giuliani said Thursday that such an interview remains possible but that Mueller’s team would need to tell the president’s why an interview would be necessary. He has previously said that the scope and length of a possible Trump interview with Mueller would need to be limited.

Giuliani said he did not believe Mueller’s team can subpoena the president and require him to speak to investigators.

“We are pretty comfortable that in the circumstances of this case, they wouldn't be able to subpoena him personally,” the president’s lawyer said. “They can't require you to testify in what would be your own case because, after all, it's all about a possible impeachment. Impeachment has to come before indictment. And that's a law not just in the United States, that's the law that governs for most heads of state in the world.”

While Giuliani and other Trump allies have argued strenuously that a sitting president cannot be indicted, others disagree. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former U.S. attorney for Connecticut, Connecticut attorney general and frequent Trump critic, argued Wednesday on CNN that "the president is not above the law, and an indictment — if that's the course that Robert Mueller chooses to go — I believe would be upheld by the courts."

Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.



CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Carter Page had been indicted.