Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team didn’t make a traditional prosecutorial judgement on whether President Trump committed obstruction of justice. But bestselling author Michael Wolff insists an indictment of the sitting president was contemplated, with legal arguments discussed at length in a 56-page “memorandum of law” Wolff claims to have in his possession.
In an interview with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep, Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury” and the forthcoming book “Siege: Trump Under Fire,” defended an explosive claim in the book that had already been called into doubt before its publication.
Last week, after Wolff’s description in the book of a “draft indictment” leaked out, Peter Carr, the spokesman for Mueller responded by saying “the documents described do not exist.” The rapid pushback from the special counsel’s office was a rare and forceful statement from an office that only once before in its two-year existence issued such a categorical denial (the first being a Buzzfeed story earlier this year that said President Trump had ordered his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress).
When asked about the denial by Inskeep, Wolff now says Carr’s statement and the document he describes are not in conflict. “It is quite possible that they responded accurately but that nevertheless this document exists” because calling it a “draft indictment” was just a shorthand for a more notional document. Wolff says it is a memo that outlines the legal arguments that could have been made if the special counsel’s team had chosen to seek an indictment of President Trump and if Trump’s lawyers then challenged it based on the long-standing Justice Department opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
“It assumes that the president has been indicted. It assumes that the president has gone into court and made a motion to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that a president cannot be indicted. And this is the response to that motion,” Wolff told Inskeep in the interview.
Wolff goes on to explain that the document has two parts. “The first part