Joe Scarborough said President Donald Trump’s lawyers are scrambling to keep him from sitting down with special counsel Robert Mueller because “he’s too dumb” during a Thursday morning segment of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Scarborough was responding to reports that the president was pushing back against his attorneys, who have repeatedly advised him against interviewing with Mueller.
In order to get the president to agree to an interview, reports circulated early in the week that Mueller had offered to have his investigators limit the scope of any questions they might ask in any potential meeting. But Trump’s attorneys have continued to advise against a direct interview.
There has also been some discussion of written questions and answers, but that could also be problematic.
To the table on “Morning Joe,” the reason was obvious. Scarborough opined, “So, it’s obvious Donald Trump’s lawyers have no confidence in him. They don’t think he’s smart enough to sit across the table …”
Cohost Mika Brzezinski weighed in, as well, saying, “They’re scared he’s going to spew out something.”
Scarborough continued, “They think he’s too dumb to do it. I’d be insulted if I was him, but he can hire the lawyers he wants to hire.”
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has addressed this particular topic on a number of occasions, agreeing with the attorneys and saying that the president should under no circumstances sit down with Robert Mueller. The reason, he said, had little to do with Trump’s intelligence.
Dershowitz explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, “If you have the president saying something that he believes is truthful, and then you have another witness, Cohen or Manafort or one of the others contradicting him without regard to who is telling the truth, you could get a perjury prosecution.”
Dershowitz continued, “So I’ve often advised clients who have insisted to me that they will only tell the truth. I say to them, ‘but it is possible that any other witness will tell the truth different than yours?'”