Steve Rattner: The Point of This Memo Was To Keep the President from Having To Be Interviewed or Testified

EXCERPT:

RATTNER: "Yeah. I thought Heidi mentioned this interview with Kevin McCarthy, which I also saw, in which he did everything he could to avoid it and just kept talking about collusion. But I just wanted to say two things. One, as I think Michael Schmidt said, the point of this memo was to keep the president from having to be interviewed or testify. It was basically to lay out all their arguments why it wasn’t necessary. We could debate this indictment question, but there’s very clear law on the president being required to give an interview or be deposed in a litigation. President Clinton did it multiple times, other presidents have done it. So it would be very interesting to see whether Mueller wants to push that point. I just want to make one other point about something in that letter that we haven't talked about that I thought was interesting, which is that they essentially said the way that the famous Lester Holt interview was being interpreted was wrong and that Trump didn’t mean to say that he fired Comey because of the Russian investigation."