President Trump is looking to add prominent D.C. attorney Theodore Olson to his personal legal team, the latest sign that the president is taking a more aggressive stance toward special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the president has extended an offer to Olson, the former U.S. solicitor general under President George W. Bush.
The Post reported that Olson, who has turned down an offer to join the Trump administration before, has not yet accepted the latest offer.
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Representatives from Trump’s legal team reached by The Hill either declined to comment or said they were not aware of the offer.
“We will not comment about conversations with lawyers with whom we have or have not had conversations,” said Jay Sekulow, counsel to the president.
The report comes after Trump attacked Mueller in a searing string of weekend tweets that have raised speculation that the president is considering firing the special counsel.
The White House denies that there are any discussions about firing Mueller, but the president is clearly frustrated by what he describes as a “witch hunt” that has cast a cloud over his administration for nearly a year now.
If Olson accepts, he would join a growing team of personal attorneys that have aggressively sought to undermine Mueller’s probe.
On Monday, Trump added white-collar attorney Joseph diGenova to his personal legal team, which also includes Sekulow, John Dowd and the president’s self-described fixer, Michael Cohen.
DiGenova is a former U.S. attorney who has fiercely attacked the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) in conservative media appearances.
He has called former FBI Director James Comey “the dirtiest cop in America” and alleged that the DOJ had framed Trump by “creating a false crime” of collusion.
In appearances on Fox News Channel and on his own radio show, Sekulow has railed against alleged corruption at the DOJ and FBI and is calling for a second special counsel to be convened to investigate anti-Trump bias at the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.
And Dowd sent Washington into a frenzy over the weekend by calling on the special counsel to end its investigation, stoking speculation that Trump might move to fire Mueller.
The rhetoric from Trump’s personal attorneys is markedly different from that of his in-house counsel, which is led by Ty Cobb.
Cobb has been saying for months that the special counsel is nearing the end of its investigation. The White House position has been to cooperate with the special counsel in the hopes that it clears the president of wrongdoing and wraps up soon.
But the White House legal team has been in a holding pattern, believing it has turned over all of the documents that Mueller has requested, even while media reports indicate that the probe has expanded to include Trump’s business empire, the business dealings of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and even to the meetings of campaign officials at an island resort in the Indian Ocean.
The addition to Trump’s personal legal team also comes as the White House and special counsel reportedly are negotiating the parameters of a potential Mueller interview of Trump.
The Washington Post reported Monday that the White House submitted some documents and written explanations to the special counsel in the hope of limiting the scope of a potential interview.
Trump has said he is eager to testify under oath to the special counsel, but some of the president’s allies are concerned about the potential for him making a false statement over the course of a free-wheeling back-and-forth.
The president’s lawyers are seeking to keep the questions Trump faces narrow and his answers short before agreeing to a sit-down.
Brett Samuels contributed.
Updated at 12:11 p.m.