Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is preparing to interview the woman who’s seen it all: Hope Hicks.

She’s been part of Donald Trump’s inner circle for years, first at Trump Tower and then as an omnipresent gatekeeper and fixer who could get emails or other communications directly to the boss during the 2016 campaign.


As a senior White House adviser and now as communications director, she’s been in the room for moments critical to Mueller’s probe, which has grown to include the president’s response to the Russia investigation itself.

Hicks’ history with Trump makes her one of the more useful witnesses for Mueller as he looks for insights into the president’s habits and moods. She also is one of the few people well positioned to recount the president’s reactions at various moments as the Russia scandal has sidetracked his presidency — including the Mueller appointment itself.

Mueller’s decision to request an interview with Hicks — who hasn’t been named in any criminal wrongdoing — also indicates he’s reached a critical point in the overall investigation, according to former prosecutors and veterans of past White House investigations. Typically, conversations with such senior-level aides are saved for near the end of a probe.

“Anytime you can get someone who is the right-hand person or who’s been around the primary target of an investigation, under oath, answering detailed questions, means you’ve progressed very far along in the investigation,” said Adam Goldberg, a former Clinton White House lawyer.

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White House attorney Ty Cobb wouldn’t say specifically when Hicks planned to appear before Mueller’s team, though he did say he was “bullish” that all current White House aides, including Hicks, will have completed interviews with the special counsel “shortly after Thanksgiving.”

“Nothing about the White House’s commitment to fully cooperate with the special counsel, including doing necessary interviews, has changed,” Cobb said on Wednesday. “We continue to be in a full cooperation posture.”

Hicks, her attorney and Mueller’s office all declined comment for this story.

People who know Hicks, 29, say she’s been preparing for months for her sit-down with Mueller’s prosecutors. She’s hired as her attorney Robert Trout, a former assistant U.S. attorney and co-founder of a white-collar law firm that has represented other high-profile people mired in Washington scandals, including President Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell during Watergate, Fawn Hall during Iran-Contra and President Bill Clinton’s paramour Monica Lewinsky.

Friends in touch with Hicks say they expect her to cooperate fully with the special counsel. “I think she’s smart enough and sensible enough that she knows she’d be doing no one any favors by lying — the best thing she can do for everyone is to tell the truth,” said one friend.

But the potential for her to be tripped up by investigators looms large given the complexity of the Russia probe and the sheer amount of time Hicks has spent by Trump’s side.

“It’s not going to be easy,” said a former Clinton White House aide who was questioned under oath during one of the many independent-counsel investigations that shadowed that Democratic administration. “It’s more of a root canal than a checkup.”

Hicks first came into Trump’s world in 2012, two years after graduating college, when the New York PR firm at which she was working tapped her to help one of its clients: Ivanka Trump. Donald Trump poached Hicks in October 2014, according to a GQ profile, and she’s listed as the point of contact that month on a news release announcing a new reservation system for the under-construction Trump hotel in Washington that would let people buy the right to book a room “should their chosen candidate become the next President of the United States.”

Hicks continued to work on Trump business operations in 2015, though her portfolio expanded into politics as her boss started hiring his first campaign staffers and early-primary state advisers ahead of his June entry into the presidential race. A McClatchy story that January — profiling the “sideshows of the Republican presidential campaign” — quotes Hicks explaining that Trump’s visits to Iowa and South Carolina in recent years had been done “to advance his goal to make America great again.”

In March 2015, during the span of nine days, Hicks is on a news release touting a new PGA golf tournament at Trump’s Los Angeles course, as the point person for the creation of Trump’s presidential exploratory committee and responding to Trump’s winter residence newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, to explain that he was looking at a run for the White House as a Republican, with plans to give up his NBC show “The Apprentice.”

After Trump officially entered the race in the late spring, with a controversial speech at Trump Tower, Hicks served as one of few core staffers and held a central role as the primary spokesperson for the campaign.

Hicks was dealing with Russia questions as early as December 2015, when she issued a statement on Trump’s behalf calling it “a great honor” after President Vladimir Putin praised him as “an outstanding and talented personality” and the “absolute leader of the presidential race.”

As the calendar flipped to 2016, Hicks started publicly crossing paths with several campaign associates who would later become central figures in Mueller’s Russia investigation.

In March 2016, Hicks joined Trump at a Washington Post editorial board meeting when he first announced a foreign policy advisory team that included Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty last month for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials.

Papadopoulos, according to Mueller’s court filings, emailed senior Trump campaign aides in late April, including then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, to tell them about calls he’d been getting “about Putin wanting to host him and the team when the time is right.” A month later, in May 2016, Hicks went on the record to the Daily Mail to dismiss a story in the Israeli newspaper Maariv saying Trump was planning a trip after the GOP convention to Israel, Germany and Russia.

She also dealt with Page, who told the House Intelligence Committee during a closed-door hearing last month that he had emailed her, Lewandowski and senior aide J.D. Gordon in June 2016 to tell them he had been invited — after joining the campaign — to speak in Moscow.

A month later, Hicks made the first in a series of comments to reporters about Page's speech in Moscow — in which he slammed the U.S. for a “hypocritical focus” on democracy and corruption in Russia — trying to explain it was not reflective of the views of the Trump campaign.

Hicks tangled with Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser and GOP dark-arts operative who has drawn scrutiny in the Russia investigation for seemingly predicting WikiLeaks’ October 2016 release of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta.

And she also had to answer for Paul Manafort, whose role spearheading GOP delegate-counting efforts at the Republican National Convention and later as campaign chairman prompted a series of media inquiries about his past business relationships. The Washington Post reported this September that Manafort had emailed Hicks in April 2016 telling her to disregard the newspaper’s questions about his ties to Putin ally and Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Manafort was indicted last month along with his protégé, Rick Gates, on multiple charges of money laundering and fraud.

Hicks tried to avoid making waves on several other Russia-related stories as the general election campaign heated up.

She referred media questions in June 2016 to the Secret Service amid the first reports in The Washington Post that Russian government hackers had breached the Democratic National Committee. She pointed reporters back to Trump’s Twitter feed that July after he joked that Russian hackers should help to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Clinton’s State Department account.

Two days after Trump’s election win, Hicks told the The New York Times, the Washington Post and other media outlets that the campaign had no contacts with the Russian government. Those comments were quickly debunked, starting with the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, who told reporters that Moscow had been in touch with Trump’s “immediate entourage.” Subsequent reports have revealed Russian meetings with, among others, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Manafort, Page and Papadopoulos.

Hicks has also been present for key Russia-related moments since arriving at the White House. She was with Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey, during the early May weekend when he decided to fire Comey. The Washington Post in September also reported Hicks was in the Oval Office for a meeting the day before the FBI director was ousted when the president described a draft letter he and senior aide Stephen Miller had written spelling out at length Trump’s complaints about Comey.

According to the Post, Hicks, White House spokesman Josh Raffel and lawyers for Kushner tried unsuccessfully while flying home from Germany in July on Air Force One to urge Trump into a more transparent public response as news broke about the Trump Tower meeting his eldest son had organized during the campaign with a Russian lawyer who was offering dirt on Clinton.

Hicks was also the only Trump aide in the room when the president sat for a Times interview in July where he revealed he wished he hadn’t nominated Sessions to be attorney general because of his recusal over the Russia probe. He also questioned the political leanings and ethics of Sessions’ deputy Rod Rosenstein.

Mueller’s team has already interviewed others who worked in the White House —including former chief of staff Reince Priebus and former press secretary Sean Spicer — but almost no one can offer prosecutors the window into the past 2½ years that Hicks can.

“If she is forthcoming and cooperative, she can be very useful to them,” said Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney closely tracking the case, who added that Hicks can explain “what was normal” and “what wasn’t normal” during the course of a typical day in the Trump campaign and the White House.

“Her access to Trump is going to be important, what she saw, what she heard,” Mariotti added.

