According to Rudy Giuliani, special counsel Robert Mueller has rebuffed an offer by President Trump’s legal team to provide answers, in writing, to Mueller’s questions.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is now on President Trump’s legal team, told CBS News correspondent Paula Reid Monday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has rejected proposals to allow Mr. Trump to answer questions from investigators in writing.

The president’s legal team has signaled that this would be their preferred format for a possible interview, since it helps protect Mr. Trump from the possibility of lying or misleading investigators, which is a criminal offense.

This doesn’t seem like just another case of CBS getting it wrong, Giuliani confirmed the story to NBC.

Rudy Giuliani tells @NBCNews that Special Counsel Mueller rejected a Trump-team offer for the president to answer written questions in lieu of a sit-down interview.

Giuliani says this happened about 10 days ago during his first meeting with Mueller.

— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) May 8, 2018

A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the last ten days. We can infer from these statements that it was Mueller’s response that motivated Giuliani to take any interview off the table when talking to George Stephanopoulos on This Week and it is what provoked Joe DiGenova to make similar remarks.

We’re told by Politico that one sticking point is the refusal by Department of Justice to show the White House Counsel Mueller’s charter.

Among the Trump legal team’s demands: a chance to review the Justice Department internal records relating to the scope of Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“We haven’t been given it. We’ve never seen it,” Giuliani said.

The Justice Department memo is already the source of controversy, and Trump last week suggested that he might intervene to get the classified records delivered to Congress. “At some point I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

If Trump is truly not a target of the investigation and they simply want to get his views on what happened in regards to the “collusion” with Russia, then written questions should work well for everyone. But no one thinks that is the true objective

Given the performance of Mueller’s team to date, the White House would be wise to fight every attempt by Mueller to place Trump in any other position than that enjoyed by Hillary Clinton. There can be no presumption of integrity or fair play. Mueller’s team is out to collect scalps.

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