President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump board Air Force One on Thursday at Joint Base Andrews prior to departing for the G-20 Summit in Buenos Aires. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo White House Mueller stalks Trump abroad — again White House aides hope the G-20 summit will showcase the president's deal-making skills. But Mueller's latest move threatens to overshadow any achievements.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — White House aides had hoped that the G-20 summit would be an opportunity for President Donald Trump to showcase his deal-making skills. Now, they’re worried that special counsel Robert Mueller’s latest bombshell could overshadow his latest tour on the world stage.

And some think that’s just the way Mueller wanted it.


In a Thursday statement, Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, called it “hardly coincidental” that Mueller made a dramatic legal move “just as the President is leaving for a meeting with world leaders,” adding that the chief Russia investigator “did the very same thing as the President was leaving for a world summit in Helsinki.”

Giuliani was referring to Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military officials for 2016 email hacks just days before Trump met with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Finland this past summer, casting a pall over the Putin meeting and forcing Trump to confront pointed questions about the Russian’s culpability.

Similarly, when Trump touches down here late Thursday, he will undoubtedly be met with sharp questions about his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for lying to Congress about an unsuccessful plan to build a luxury tower in Moscow.

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There’s no evidence that Mueller sought, in either case, to overshadow Trump’s travel. But the special counsel’s latest move has already forced Trump to denounce his former personal lawyer as a “liar” in remarks to reporters before his departure — and obscured Trump’s upcoming sit-down with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

It also increases the chances that a president who has proven irritable at past confabs of world leaders might say or do something rash in Buenos Aires. People close to the president warned that Trump is even more unpredictable when he’s angry, raising the possibility that he could go way off script here.

Trump is tentatively scheduled to hold a solo news conference during the summit, according to an administration official — a forum that has created spectacles at past international events. The official stressed that the news conference could be scuttled.

“Without question, President Trump arrives at the G-20 as a very damaged and weak leader,” said former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a frequent Trump critic.

Trump world calls such talk nonsense. The president’s closest advisers, including his family, feel that Cohen is a slimy character, and insist that Thursday’s plea deal is specific to Cohen’s situation, not an indicator that a slew of plea deals over lying to Congress is in the works, according to a source close to the president.

Whatever the long-term implications of Cohen’s plea, it casts a dark shadow over Trump at a summit that promised to be a chance for him to escape the D.C. gossip mill and change the political narrative in his favor.

Administration officials have touted a Saturday dinner with Xi, casting it as a make-or-break moment for the U.S.-China trade relations. Though senior aides have downplayed the prospect of a major breakthrough at the meeting, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that U.S. and Chinese officials are weighing a deal in which Trump holds off on imposing additional tariffs while the two nations continue trade negotiations.

Such an agreement would be an incremental victory, but it could be cast by the White House as a major development in a bid to paint Trump as victorious at the end of the summit.

Even a symbolic victory could be bittersweet, however, if Trump aides and officials are spooked about the prospect that others could be charged with the crime to which Cohen pleaded: lying to Congress. Those close to the president who have testified on Capitol Hill include his son, Donald Trump Jr., and several current or former top White House aides.

Several former Trump aides who have testified before Congress and met with Mueller insisted they are not concerned.

“It’s very common that people talk to Congress and also talk to the feds, but it rarely leads to charges of lying to Congress,” said one person close to the investigation. “It's very specific to whether you intentionally lie to Congress.”

One former senior administration official suggested that the real story is — as Trump has insisted — Mueller’s allegedly aggressive tactics, and echoed the president’s suggestion that Cohen wants to please Mueller in order to avoid jail time for other alleged crimes.

“Shit, if [Cohen] broke the law, he’s probably no different than anyone else. He’s trying to take care of himself,” this person said. “When you’re worried about losing your fortune, losing your liberty — who knows what you’ll say.”

Trump has been similarly fixated in recent weeks over what he says are Mueller’s strong-arm tactics. He’s ranted in both public and in private about what he calls a political witch hunt aimed at undermining his presidency.

But even before Thursday’s Cohen plea, people close to Trump expected that something might inevitably derail White House efforts to keep the president on message — from a particularly saucy tweet to a behind-the-scenes diplomatic snafu.

“I don’t even think the president knows in advance what’s going to happen; neither do his senior advisors,” said one person who has worked on Trump’s trade strategy.

“The likelihood that there will be any number of story lines that could not be predicted in advance and weren’t written up in his national security briefing materials is pretty high,” a former senior Trump administration official said. “Who knows what it will be. The one safe prediction is that there is likely to be some significant news that will change the geopolitical dynamics and potentially move markets.”

The White House has plenty of experience with the president’s foreign trips not going according to plan. Trump’s November trip to Paris, for example, was overshadowed by the White House’s decision not to visit a U.S. military cemetery outside the city because of bad weather — a decision Trump later said he rued.

And administration officials still have painful flashbacks to the June G-7 summit in Canada, when an isolated Trump left early and declared via Twitter that he was backing out of a joint statement that had already been negotiated by the participating countries. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow noted dryly to reporters recently that his heart attack came after that chaotic meeting.

In Buenos Aires, however, the two meetings that had the biggest potential to cause an international uproar — get-togethers with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Mohammed bin Salman — will not happen.

Trump announced Thursday on Twitter from Air Force One that he was canceling the meeting with Putin, citing Russia’s capture of Ukrainian ships in waters off the Crimean Peninsula. And the White House structured Trump’s schedule to leave little room for a sit-down with the Saudi leader, known colloquially as MBS, who has come under fierce international criticism for his alleged role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

A friendly meeting with MBS, experts warned, could be seen by the Saudis as a signal that the Trump administration approves of Saudi Arabia’s behavior.

“I think there is some danger of course any time this president sits down with a leader like MBS,” said Robert Jordan, who served as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “The danger of an inadvertent signal to him that he should go about business as usual is very troubling.”

Jordan and other analysts said the nightmare scenario for the United States would be for Trump to fawn all over MBS during a potential meeting, shaking hands and smiling for all the world to see.

“It would greenlight this conduct for all the dictators of the world,” Jordan said.

But White House officials didn’t rule out that Trump could speak with MBS, Putin or any other world leader on the sidelines of the meeting, discussions that might never be made public if conducted out of sight of reporters. “He’s going to do what he wants,” one administration official said, reflecting the widespread belief in the West Wing that Trump can’t be managed.

As for the actual substance of the G-20 meeting, administration officials don’t seem to be very worried about the prospect that any talks will collapse without a joint communique detailing broad areas of agreement among the nations.

“I don’t think anybody on our team is on pins and needles about the communique,” Kudlow said earlier this week, adding, “If we don’t get one, no tears will be shed.”

Restuccia reported from Buenos Aires, Orr from Washington.