White House

But legal experts say a White House effort to block the special counsel from speaking to Congress would lead to ‘uncharted waters.’

When President Donald Trump contradicted his own attorney general and declared on Sunday that special counsel Robert Mueller “should not testify” before Congress, he caught his inner circle by surprise.

A day later, more than a dozen people from Trump’s close orbit downplayed in interviews the prospect that the president’s weekend tweet about Mueller should be taken as an official warning.

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Trump does not actually intend to assert executive privilege and block the special counsel from testifying as soon as next week, they said, before the one House committee with the power to begin impeachment proceedings against the president.

Like so many other controversies ignited by Trump’s social media feed, this one may be more bluster than live-wire legal showdown.

“He is not signaling anything other than, as an innocent man so found by Mr. Mueller, he just wants this over. He’d like to govern. That’s all he’s saying,” Joe diGenova, an informal Trump legal adviser, told POLITICO.

The Trump White House all but ignored the tweet, which raised Democratic hackles and contradicted the president’s own statement on Friday that the decision was up to Attorney General William Barr.

One White House aide argued that Trump had done nothing more than express a personal view. “Where did he say he would block [Mueller] from testifying? I know that’s what the media said — but where did he say it?” the aide told POLITICO.

“Bob Mueller should not testify,” Trump’s Sunday afternoon tweet declared. “No redos for the Dems!”

Rudy Giuliani, a Trump personal attorney, said he hadn’t spoken to his client about the subject but downplayed the idea that Trump had foreshadowed a dramatic clash with Congress. “I think I’d have to hear the words ‘We’re invoking executive privilege’ to know they’ve come to that conclusion,” Giuliani said in an interview.

Others around the president explained that Trump is still not foreclosing an option to fight back against House investigators, and that he may yet invoke an executive privilege claim to halt potential testimony by Mueller or his deputies. A similar clash could play out as House Judiciary Committee Democrats press for compliance by Tuesday with their subpoena seeking documents from former Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn, whose account of potential obstruction of justice by the president litter Mueller’s report. The Democrats’ subpoena also seeks McGahn’s testimony by May 21.

Legal experts said that a direct order from Trump to stifle Mueller’s testimony could trigger a battle over executive privilege as consequential as it is unpredictable.

“We are in uncharted waters here,” said Greg Brower, the former head of the FBI’s congressional affairs office.

Democrats so far have shown no sign of backing down in their push for what would be blockbuster testimony from Mueller, who has not spoken publicly since his May 2017 appointment as special counsel investigating Russian election interference.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has said he’d like to bring Mueller before his panel in mid-May. The New York Democrat is negotiating with DOJ officials about that possibility.

Stinging testimony from Mueller that accentuates his written findings — or even tactical signals that he intended his report as a call for Congress to act — could fuel calls for impeachment proceedings that Democratic leaders, fearful of political overreach, have sought to quash.

“This certainly seems like the biggest hearing for Congress since Watergate,” said Ted Kalo, a former Democratic general counsel to the House Judiciary Committee. “His ability to explain his conclusions and defend his report is the whole ballgame right now.”

While Mueller found no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow, his report cited 10 instances where the president interfered in the probe, but made no determination on whether he obstructed justice. Mueller also said that Justice Department legal opinions preclude prosecuting a sitting president.

Trump “can’t be both immune from prosecution and at the same time be able to thwart Congress from getting all the facts that might inform the House’s impeachment decision,” Brower said.

Trump waived executive privilege during Mueller’s probe and allowed the release of more than 1.4 million pages of documents and voluntary interviews from dozens of staffers.

Still, Trump legal allies say the Justice Department would have standing to prevent or limit Mueller’s testimony on executive privilege grounds.

Emmet Flood, the White House lawyer handling all Mueller matters, previewed the potential executive privilege fight ahead in a letter to Barr sent in mid-April and released publicly last week. Flood’s letter indicated that Trump doesn’t consider the release of the Mueller report a waiver of executive privilege claims for future testimony.

DiGenova said Mueller can’t testify at all without the permission of the Justice Department, to which he still reported as a paid employee as of Monday. “And the department has the authority to limit his testimony if it chooses to do so, which I do not anticipate it will,” diGenova said.

He nevertheless identified one potential area of limitation: negotiations between Mueller’s team and the president’s lawyers about a potential interview with Trump. (The interview wound up being conducted in writing.)

Another source familiar with the Trump legal team’s thinking added an additional caveat: Even if Mueller was no longer a government employee the 74-year old former FBI director could face a penalty if he defied a DOJ order.

“He could lose his bar license because he’s disobeying the instruction of a former client. Or the White House could get a court order stopping him from testifying if he refuses to follow the president’s instruction,” said the source familiar with Trump legal team thinking.

Democrats were much more inclined than the president’s allies to take Trump’s Mueller tweet seriously.

“The administration keeps sinking lower and lower. And I imagine they really will try and stop Mueller from testifying,” Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview.

Former Obama Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller called it “ridiculous” for Trump to argue that Mueller should opt out of testifying to Congress. He added that the Justice Department can’t stop Mueller from speaking out about most parts of his work once he’s a private citizen.

“I know of no instance where the department has been able to affirmatively restrain anyone from executing their First Amendment rights, especially if they were responding to a lawful subpoena,” Miller said.

Miller cited the Trump administration’s early 2017 efforts to prevent former acting Attorney General Sally Yates from giving congressional testimony about ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.

“She ignored them and they did nothing, either preemptively or after her testimony, because there was nothing they could do,” Miller said.

Mueller’s testimony could inflict damage not only on Trump but Barr as well. People close to Barr have expressed concern about how Mueller might characterize a conversation the two men had about Barr’s March 24 four-page memo summarizing the special counsel’s findings.

Barr addressed the subject during his testimony last Wednesday before the panel.

“I said, ‘Bob, what’s with the letter? Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call me if there’s an issue?’” Barr said.

Many Democrats argued that Barr lied to Congress when he told a House panel he was unaware of complaints from Mueller’s team about how he had rolled out the report, even though the special counsel had sent a letter complaining to the attorney general that he “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of their Russia investigation.

Any daylight between Barr’s account and the one Mueller offers if he testifies would fuel Democratic demands for his resignation.

In the meantime, Trump is trying to turn the spotlight back on Democrats, saying they are more interested in digging up dirt than in legislating, and that it is they who should be investigated.

The Trump campaign has texted supporters urging them to sign a petition arguing that it is “TIME TO INVESTIGATE THE INVESTIGATORS.” Such petitions are typically used to collect the contact information of supporters and used later for fundraising.

A source to the White House said Trump has little room to maneuver, beyond the politics of the moment, in forcing a legal showdown over Mueller’s testimony. “How do you block the guy who supposedly exonerated you?” the person said.

DiGenova said he expected Trump or his White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, will be speaking with Barr about Mueller’s testimony “just to make sure that everybody is on the same page.”

But he added that the tweet itself was no change in administration policy. “No big deal,” he said. “The president tweets all the time. I’d assume now after three years people would be used to it.”

Andrew Desiderio, Andrew Restuccia and Heather Caygle contributed to this report.

2020 Elections

‘A lot of people don’t know who he is on this side of the country or what he stands for,’ says one top South Carolina Democrat.

ORANGEBURG, S.C. — Pete Buttigieg wants to have a conversation with African-American voters. But he can’t seem to reach them.

He scheduled a meet-and-greet Monday in Orangeburg — a city that is 76 percent black — but only a dozen or so people of color showed up in a crowd of more than 100. At a town hall the night before — held at a North Charleston high school where minority enrollment is 97 percent in a city that is roughly half-black — it was another overwhelmingly white audience.

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The composition of his audiences is a familiar issue for Buttigieg, who’s surged in recent national and state polls but struggled to make inroads with one of the party’s most important constituencies.

Recent polling shows Buttigieg winning only 2 percent among African-Americans, so he needs to begin addressing the issue quickly to have any hope of contending for the Democratic nomination — or competing in South Carolina, an early-primary state where African-Americans cast roughly 60 percent of primary votes in 2016.

“A lot of people don’t know who he is on this side of the country or what he stands for,” said state Rep. Jerry Govan, a veteran lawmaker who represents Orangeburg and chairs the state’s Legislative Black Caucus. “The only thing people are getting about him is what they’re seeing in national media.”

Since Buttigieg’s last trip to South Carolina in March, national media have reported his dismissal of South Bend’s first black police chief in 2011; his remark in 2015, later walked back, that “all lives matter” — a stance that some Democratic activists’ message view as a devaluation of “Black Lives Matter;” and criticism over how his housing initiative hurt black and brown families.

Recognizing his need to gain traction among black voters, the South Bend, Ind., mayor has recently embarked on an outreach tour that unofficially kicked off last week with a meal with civil rights leader Al Sharpton at Sylvia’s, a famed soul food restaurant in Harlem.

Next came a campaign swing here — a trip marked by three visits to cities with large minority populations.

At his event in Orangeburg, Buttigieg outlined his agenda for black America, an agenda that focuses on home ownership, health care, entrepreneurship, criminal justice reform and education.

“One of the most important pieces of homework for our campaign is to make sure that there is no question in the minds of any minority voters, black voters here in South Carolina or anywhere in the country, where I stand and what I will do,” Buttigieg told the audience.

He argues that minority voters who know him best, residents of South Bend, helped re-elect him mayor. “But out here, people are just getting to know me,” he said. “Trust in part is a function of quantity time, and we’re racing against time.”

“I need help,” Buttigieg conceded.

Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist, credited Buttigieg for meeting with Sharpton but stressed that he needs to build relationships in South Carolina and talk to voters here.

“I actually think it’s malpractice for him to not spend significant time with black voters,” he said, “because it’s very clear that we are the most dominant force in the Democratic primary and we will decide who the Democratic nominee will be.”

At his first event in North Charleston, Buttigieg made a direct appeal to supporters to help him expand his base “to not only help this campaign but to shape it, to find people who perhaps do not look like you and make sure that they are aware of this message and they are communicating to us how this campaign can best speak to them.”

While many of his competitors have ties to South Carolina and staff on the ground, Buttigieg’s campaign hasn’t hired a team in South Carolina yet. Many black leaders say they haven’t heard from him.

“I don’t know who he’s reached out to,” said Govan. “I haven’t heard anything from the other leadership in the area as far as him reaching out to them. I don’t know who he’s talking to.”

State Rep. Annie McDaniel, who represents a rural community and has endorsed Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) , said she hasn’t heard much about Buttigieg.

“I’ve heard a little, but I hadn’t heard a whole lot,” she said. “Now I don’t know if that means I may not be in the circle of influence that he possesses, that I’m old and he’s young and he’s of a different generation. I’m not exactly sure.”

State Rep. JA Moore, who said he received a call from Buttigieg before endorsing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and becoming a co-chair of her state campaign, said he had a “robust” and “constructive” conversation with the 37-year-old mayor.

But, he warned, “he has absolutely no chance to become the nominee if he can’t build a coalition of African-Americans and especially African-American women.”

“Mayor Pete has a lot of work to do when it comes building that relationship,” he said.

Buttigieg told a small group of reporters Monday that his campaign will soon announce on-the-ground staff in South Carolina. He also estimated meeting with “a few dozen” black leaders during this visit, but attributed the lack of diversity at his campaign events to a lack of established relationships or professional staff on the ground.

“It’s one thing to kinda put out word and see who finds their way to us,” he said. “It’s another to really be building the relationships in neighborhoods and organizations and churches that will help invite people into this process who maybe wouldn’t find their way to me otherwise. We know we’ve got our work cut out for us. That’s exactly why we’re here now and why we won’t stop returning until we’ve built the kind of coalition that we want.”

Columbia City Councilwoman Tameika Isaac Devine, who also serves as mayor pro tem, met with Buttigieg ahead of his final event in the state, an invitation-only town hall in Columbia on Monday night. Devine said she was asked to recommend invitees, an indication that the campaign was trying to get Buttigieg in front of black leaders in the community. That event, however, was also dominated by white attendees.

Buttigieg acknowledges the task ahead in South Carolina if he wants to be competitive.

“We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us. We’re building a campaign staff team that’s gonna reflect the diversity of our party and our generation, but clearly we’ve got a long way to go before we can say the same about our support base,” he told reporters Sunday. “In order to win and in order to deserve to win, my campaign needs to go above and beyond in reaching out to black voters.”

Buttigieg is up against a formidable group of candidates, including two black senators — Harris and Booker — and a popular former vice president, Joe Biden, who served eight years alongside the nation’s first black president. Biden released a list of nearly two dozen endorsements throughout the state on Monday, and reportedly raised more than $100,000 at a weekend fundraiser hosted by South Carolina state Sen. Dick Harpootlian.

“To have somebody who comes on the scene who is not a candidate of color and who has also not been a national figure for years means we’ve got to do in a matter of months that same kind of trust-building and relationship-building work,” Buttigieg said, addressing the disadvantage he has in the black community as a white male candidate without a long national profile.

Trav Robertson, chair of the state Democratic Party, said Buttigieg has been reaching out to elected officials, particularly throughout regions with large concentrations of African-Americans. He said Buttigieg visited the party’s last executive committee meeting and noted a surge in interest in his campaign after his “Meet the Press” interview last month, when he was asked about the housing policy and “all lives matter” remark.

“We got a significant number of telephone calls in our office wanting to know when he was coming to South Carolina and when his staff was gonna be on the ground,” Robertson said. “But at the end of the day, all of these candidates running for president have had some type of leadership, and, you know, there’s always gonna be a discussion about decisions they made or didn’t make. That’s just part of the give and take.”

Foreign Policy

The Trump administration has redirected an aircraft carrier to the region as Iran is expected to pull back on commitments to freeze its nuclear program.

President Donald Trump has moved closer to a military conflict with Iran than at any time in his presidency, redirecting warships to the Middle East to respond to what officials said Monday are heightened Iranian threats to U.S. troops and facilities.

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is headed to the region earlier than planned ahead of Iran’s expected announcement on Wednesday that it will pull back on some of its commitments under the Iran nuclear deal, which the U.S. quit a year ago on Trump’s order. The White House, meanwhile, is expected to impose even more sanctions on Iran in the coming days.

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Taken together, Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” against the Islamic Republic and its latest attempt at gunboat diplomacy may be reaching a hazardous crescendo.

“I don’t think either side wants to go to war, but this is the kind of brinksmanship that could get out of hand,” said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

The situation has escalated swiftly since Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization last month, a move some top Pentagon officials warned could lead to retaliation by Iran or its proxies against the United States and its allies, including Israel. The rising tensions are now sparking fears that a sudden move on either side, even if unintended, could spiral into a military conflict.

“It’s a standard part of the Iranian playbook: Under pressure, you don’t give in, you don’t submit, you strike back,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Like others, however, Maloney expressed concern about the rhetoric coming from the White House, where hawkish national security adviser John Bolton, who has a track record of calling for the overthrow of the Iranian regime, has been a main architect of the tougher policy.

Regional experts are also keeping a close eye on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former lawmaker who harbors intense dislike for the Iranian regime. Pompeo and Bolton are believed to be more willing to do at least limited battle with Iran than Trump, who has long expressed wariness of getting entangled in wars in the Middle East. At times, that has led to mixed signals from the White House.

“The fact is we can’t put any faith in what this administration says, and that’s what really scares me,” Maloney said.

The potential for Iranian retaliation in the region has put U.S. officials on edge, especially in Iraq, where Iranian-armed Shia militias have attacked American troops and facilities in the past. Approximately 5,200 U.S. military personnel remain in the country.

“There has definitely been an uptick in threat reporting directed at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq,” a U.S. official told POLITICO. “It’s more than we’ve seen in a long time, and it suggests the de facto moratorium on attacks on U.S. facilities by Iranian sponsored groups is fraying.”

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan on Monday called the decision to send the Lincoln battle group from the Mediterranean Sea closer to Iran sooner than planned — along with bomber aircraft — “a prudent repositioning of assets in response to indications of a credible threat by Iranian regime forces.”

“We call on the Iranian regime to cease all provocation,” Shanahan added. “We will hold the Iranian regime accountable for any attack on US forces or our interests.”

On Monday, the acting Pentagon spokesperson Charles Summers Jr. said the move “ensures we have the forces we need in the region to respond to contingencies and to defend U.S. forces and interests in the region.”

“We do not seek war with the Iranian regime,” he added, “but we will defend U.S. personnel, our allies and our interests in the region.”

Iran is engaged in several diplomatic and military conflicts with U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have supported U.S. moves against Tehran.

In Yemen, for instance, Iran is supporting rebels fighting a Saudi-led military coalition backed by America.

“We’ve been hearing from the Saudis and the Emiratis that they expected to see Iranian escalation either in Yemen or the Red Sea to put pressure on their oil exports to Europe,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group.

But “Iraq is where [the Iranians] feel most comfortable, and there are a lot of options for targeting U.S. assets,” he added.

An Arab diplomat, who supports the Trump’s administration’s posture toward Iran and spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic, also told POLITICO that “if Iran is going to retaliate, it will probably retaliate in the region: Yemen, Iraq.”

Tehran is also expected to up the stakes in other ways.

An Iranian state media outlet reported that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani plans to announce on Wednesday that Iran will reduce its adherence to the pact. The move is pegged to the first anniversary of Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the nuclear deal.

It was not immediately clear what steps Iran would take. But the report indicated that the Iranians believe they have the right to make such moves under sections of the agreement that allow reciprocal actions when one party, in this case the United States, violates its commitments.

“My sense is that they are going to break out of some of the limits on research and development,” said Vaez, who is in regular contact with Iranian officials. “It’s a smart strategy. It’s an escalation, but an incremental and reversible one. They’re probably going to use it as leverage to put more pressure on the remaining signatories of the deal to throw them a lifeline.”

Those other countries party to the nuclear deal — China, Russia, Germany, France, Britain — have repeatedly condemned Trump’s decision to quit the agreement and urged Iran to stick to it.

The Europeans in particular have tried to set up a financial mechanism that could help Iran circumvent sanctions, but European companies for the most part are steering clear of the Iranian market in the face of potential U.S. sanctions.

The Trump administration has taken numerous actions in recent months to tighten a noose around Iran’s Islamist regime.

That includes trying to bring Iran’s oil revenue down to zero. The U.S. recently announced it would no longer grant waivers to countries that import Iranian oil, a set that includes India and China. It’s not clear whether those countries will cooperate, despite the threat they could face sanctions if they keep up their oil trade with Iran.

The Trump administration’s overall goal appears to be to starve the Iranian regime of funding so that at the very least it cannot support proxy militias and other groups that have given Tehran a foothold in other countries in the Middle East. The U.S. pressure has already badly damaged Iran’s economy.

“There’s going to be gradually increasing pressure,” predicted the Arab diplomat. “Any revenue stream Iran has, there’s going to be attempts to cut it off. The policy is designed to cut off revenue to a country that we all know conducts foreign terrorist operations.”

But the sanctions will also make tougher the lives of ordinary Iranians who are increasingly struggling to make ends meet.

“It’s really unfortunate,” the Arab diplomat said. “But this is the result of the regime’s policy choices.”