WASHINGTON — Short-lived White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Sunday that President Trump should not say a word to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Scaramucci said Trump must turn down any request to testify before Mueller in his ongoing probes into Russian meddling in the presidential election and obstruction of justice.
“I actually don’t want him to testify,” Scaramucci told ABC’s “This Week,” “because as a lawyer, I don’t want him caught in a gotcha moment where somebody accuses him of lying where he may not remember something or something like that.”
Scaramucci, who was fired from the White House after 11 days for wagging his jaws at a reporter in an obscene interview, said Trump would be better off keeping his mouth shut.
“I’m just giving you my personal opinion. I would say, ‘Sir, there’s no reason to testify. Let the thing unfold the way it is.’ … I know there was no collusion.”
Trump has previously signaled a willingness to testify under oath to Mueller. But as the investigation has swept up four members of his campaign team, Trump has taken to discrediting the probe.
He and his GOP allies in Congress have latched onto a Republican memo that accused the FBI of abusing its power in getting a warrant to surveil a Trump adviser, Carter Page.
“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” the president tweeted Saturday. “But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”
Since his White House ouster, the Mooch has been on a media tour and trying to revive his public image and rekindle his role as a Trump defender.
In an appearance Friday on Bill Maher’s HBO show, Scaramucci tussled with former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.