Mueller interviews with senior White House officials coming up
Washington (CNN)Investigators
working for special counsel Robert Mueller are scheduled to interview
additional senior White House officials in the coming weeks, adding to
their list of high-profile interviews and pushing the investigation
closer to President Donald Trump and his family.
On
the slate are White House communications director Hope Hicks, White
House counsel Don McGahn and Josh Raffel, a communications aide to White
House senior adviser Jared Kushner. Other staff are also expected to be
interviewed.
These three
staffers have spent considerable time around the highest echelon of the
Trump administration and campaign. Given their involvement in some key
events under scrutiny by the special counsel, Mueller's interest in
talking to them signals continued focus on Trump and the White House.
"It
is my hope and expectation that shortly after Thanksgiving, all the
White House interviews will be concluded," White House special counsel
Ty Cobb told CNN on Thursday.
Mueller's
team has already interviewed White House senior policy adviser Stephen
Miller, Trump's former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and
former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Spicer and Priebus left
the White House over the summer, but they were still around when Trump
fired FBI Director James Comey. Miller was also involved in the Trump
campaign.
The
special counsel is investigating Russian election meddling, potential
collusion with Russians by the Trump campaign and potential obstruction
of justice as it reacted to the probe.
Here
is a breakdown of some of the interviews taking place soon, and how the
White House officials facing questions might be of interest to
Mueller's sweeping investigation.
Hope Hicks: The confidante
Hicks
has long been seen as one of Trump's most trusted confidantes. She has
served as a sounding board for the president -- which could give
Mueller's team insights on his thinking.
Her work for Trump intersects with the Russia investigation in a few distinct ways.
She
first worked for the Trump Organization and was one of the earliest
members to join his campaign team in spring 2015. She was almost always
at his side on the campaign trail, and she now works from a desk just
outside the Oval Office. Her profile has continued rising inside the
administration, and she was elevated to White House communications
director in July.
Hope Hicks (AP/Andrew Harnik)
Donald
Trump Jr. confirmed last week that he exchanged some private Twitter
messages during the campaign with WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website
that published damaging materials about the Democratic National
Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign during the heat of the
election. After the first exchanges in September 2016, Trump Jr.
informed a group of senior Trump campaign officials including Kushner
over email. Kushner forwarded the email to Hicks, according to The
Atlantic which first reported the story.
Trump,
71, does not use a computer, and Hicks would regularly print out
articles and memos for him during the presidential campaign. Mueller's
team will likely want to know if she shared Kushner's email with Trump
and if there were any additional discussions about WikiLeaks.
On
at least two occasions, then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort
emailed Hicks asking her to dismiss questions from reporters about his
international dealings and his relationship with Russian oligarch Oleg
Deripaska, according to the Washington Post. Manafort was indicted last
month on charges stemming from his lobbying work before he joined the
campaign for Russia-friendly clients in Ukraine. He has pleaded not
guilty to the charges.
In
his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, former Trump
campaign adviser Carter Page said he emailed Hicks and two other
campaign officials before embarking on a trip to Russia in July 2016.
Page insists that the trip was unrelated to the campaign, though he
admitted asking campaign officials for input on a speech he delivered at
a Moscow university.
Days after
the election, Hicks issued denials on behalf of the campaign that
haven't held up. She told The New York Times that the campaign was "not
aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any
foreign entities" during the election. And she told The Associated Press
that "there was no communication between the campaign and any foreign
entity during the campaign."
It was
later revealed -- through press reports and public acknowledgements --
that several campaign officials had contacts with Russians, including
Kushner, Trump Jr., Manafort, and Page, as welll as Trump campaign
foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, who
advised the campaign and briefly served as national security adviser in
the White House before resigning.
Earlier
this year, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI
about his interactions with foreign officials close to the Russian
government.
Hicks was in the Oval
Office as Trump discussed firing Comey in early May, The Washington Post
reported. His firing is a key part of Mueller's investigation into
obstruction of justice.
She was
also there when the Trump White House scrambled to respond to a
bombshell report that Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner met with a Russian
lawyer during the campaign. Trump Jr.'s first response, which the
president was involved in crafting onboard Air Force One, was misleading
and didn't mention that the rendezvous had been arranged after he was
told that it could bring incriminating information about Clinton. As The
New York Times published more stories, Trump Jr. later acknowledged the
Clinton angle.
That series of
events, which took place largely without lawyers, opened up those White
House officials to legal scrutiny and in many ways led to their
interviews with the Mueller team.
Hicks' attorney Robert Trout declined to comment for this story.
Don McGahn: The lawyer
An
attorney who specialized in campaign finance for many years, McGahn was
the top lawyer for the Trump campaign. He was appointed White House
counsel and has since had a front-row seat for a handful of issues that
are now under intense scrutiny by Mueller's team.
Flynn
personally informed McGahn during the transition that he was under
investigation for his undisclosed lobbying for Turkey, according to The
New York Times. That conversation took place in early January, and Flynn
was still allowed to become national security adviser.
Things
got worse after Trump's inauguration. Then-acting Attorney General
Sally Yates privately met with McGahn twice, where she warned him that
Flynn was subject to blackmail by the Russians because he was lying
about his calls with then-Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. Those
White House officials repeated his lies in public, creating the
compromising situation.
McGahn
briefed Trump about her warnings, but Flynn stayed on as national
security adviser. He only resigned after it was publicly reported that
he misled senior White House officials, including Vice President Mike
Pence, about his conversations with Kislyak.
Mueller's team will likely ask McGahn about the series of events that led to Flynn's resignation.
As
the top White House lawyer, McGahn also played a key role in Comey's
firing, and Mueller's investigators will surely pepper him with
questions about the process and Trump's thinking.
In
early May, Trump and Miller, the senior policy aide, had drafted a memo
that detailed reasons to fire Comey, but McGahn was concerned about the
letter and it was never released, according to The New York Times.
Instead, McGahn edited the memo and sent it back to Trump and Miller
with revisions. Mueller's team has a copy of the original draft, the
newspaper reported.
After that
back-and-forth, McGahn arranged for an Oval Office meeting to discuss
the firing with Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Sessions and Rosenstein left the
meeting with a directive to prepare the legal framework necessary to
terminate Comey, according to the Washington Post. Comey was fired the
next day.
Josh Raffel: The PR specialist
After
working with Kushner in the private sector, doing public relations for
Kushner Companies, Raffel joined the White House as as a communications
aide for the White House Office of American Innovation, which Kushner
runs. He also handles Kushner-related press inquiries.
Raffel
was involved in discussions about how to respond to the inquiries about
the Trump Tower meeting. He was also aboard Air Force One when the
president took part in crafting the response that was ultimately
released by the Trump Organization under Trump Jr.'s name.
These
discussions will likely be of interest to Mueller's team -- at the very
least, they could shed light on how much Trump and others knew about
the meetings before learning about them in the press reports. The White
House says it didn't learn about the meeting until the press reports.
This article has been updated.
