March 5, 2018 / by emptywheel

 

The Nunberg Subpoena: Is He Protecting Bannon, Rather than Trump?

This WaPo article reporting that Sam Nunberg will refuse to appear before the Grand Jury on Friday confirms that the subpoena everyone reported on was his.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Nunberg said he was asked to come to Washington to appear before the grand jury on Friday. He also provided The Washington Post a copy of his two-page grand jury subpoena seeking documents related to President Trump and nine other people, including emails, correspondence, invoices, telephone logs, calendars and “records of any kind.”

Nunberg, who was reportedly already interviewed by Mueller’s team, says he’s not going to show up.

“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg said. “Mr. Mueller should understand I am not going in on Friday.”

You’d think he was doing this in hopes that Trump might protect him, except this kind of stuff is not the way to elicit favors from Trump.

“The Russians and Trump did not collude,” Nunberg said. “Putin is too smart to collude with Donald Trump.”

[snip]

“Donald Trump won this election on his own. He campaigned his ass off. And there is nobody who hates him more than me.”

Which is why I wonder whether Nunberg’s refusal to testify has more to do with protecting Bannon, with whom he’s still quite chummy, than the President.

“I’m not spending 80 hours going over my emails with Roger Stone and Stephen K. Bannon and producing them,” Nunberg said.

Among those listed in Nunberg’s subpoena, Bannon almost the only one who was a mild surprise.

  1. Carter Page
  2. Corey Lewandowski
  3. Donald J. Trump
  4. Hope Hicks
  5. Keith Schiller
  6. Michael Cohen
  7. Paul Manafort
  8. Rick Gates
  9. Roger Stone
  10. Steve Bannon

Most people on the list are known to be subjects of the investigation. Hicks (who probably is the subject of the obstruction investigation anyway) and Schiller are the two people closest to Trump at key times during the campaign. And Lewandowski was involved in managing the outreach to Europe for key periods of the campaign (and is really squirrelly about what he did after the campaign).

Which leaves Bannon, who was involved in some key meetings during the transition, and whose opposition to the Trump meeting was always about Don Jr and Manafort not involving lawyers than opposition to obtaining stolen emails generally.

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Originally Posted @ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/03/05/the-nunberg-subpoena-is-he-protecting-bannon-rather-than-trump/