Conservative journalist Bill Kristol said Saturday that President Donald Trump's attorneys leaked a January letter they wrote to Russia special counsel Robert Mueller to The New York Times, calling it "a public relations document."
"It's not a letter designed to persuade Robert Mueller or any serious lawyers of anything," Kristol, editor-at-large for The Weekly Standard, told Ana Cabrera on CNN.
"It's designed, ultimately, for public consumption, to be released publicly, to try to make their case to their own supporters, primarily, to justify not testifying and to justify pardons and to justify a generally hostile stance towards the investigation.
"This is not an internal legal document, really," Kristol said. "It's a public relations document, if you just read through it.
"If any serious lawyer reads it, there's not detailed legal arguments in there."
The Times reported Saturday that it had "obtained" a 20-page letter written in January and "hand-delivered" to Mueller's team outlining why President Trump could not obstruct justice in any Russia investigation.
The attorneys at the time, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, argued that the Constitution empowered the president to, "if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon."
Kristol told Cabrera that the document was laced with "extremely broad assertions and a lot of rhetoric."
He said that he "assumed" Trump's lawyers leaked the letter to the newspaper because "Mueller's team has been air-tight."
"I would suspect, either, they think a subpoena is coming soon or indictments are coming soon on obstruction," Kristol said.
"For some reason, they want to get their argument out there so their people can get used to making this very broad and difficult-to-sustain argument … that's got the pretense of legal backing in a 20-page memo.
"Trump's supporters can start making this argument now," he told Cabrera. "For me, the question of why leaking it now is very interesting."
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