Giuliani backtracks: Obstruction questions ‘not ruled in or out’ for Mueller

President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is walking back comments he made to The Associated Press in which he said Trump wouldn’t answer any of special counsel Robert Mueller’s questions on obstruction of justice.

Those questions are “not ruled in or out,” Giuliani told NBC News in an interview Thursday night, shortly after the original reports that he had said otherwise.

{mosads}”We’re very opposed to that [but] we’re not closing it off 100 percent,” Giuliani also told Politico on Thursday. “We don’t want to mislead [prosecutors] and have them think it’s easy, but we have also not closed our mind to it.”

Mueller is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, as well as whether the president has obstructed justice as a means to hinder that probe.

Giuliani’s clarification came amid a reported internal debate among Trump’s legal team on if the president should sit down for an interview with the special prosecutor.

While Trump has said he’s eager to sit down with Mueller, his lawyers reportedly fear their client would perjure himself.

Giuliani didn’t completely close the door on the possibility of a sit-down interview between Mueller and the president.

“I think we’re pretty close to an agreement, maybe this weekend,” he said to Politico.

“We have said we would agree to written questions on Russia after we review questions but no further commitment on interviews. After we finish this we will assess it with no agreement to any post-presidential questions,” Giuliani told NBC News. 

He added that for now there’s “no commitment on obstruction which are post-presidential matters” but says the legal team will agree to talk “after the collusion/pre-presidential questions are over.” 

Reports emerged on Tuesday that Mueller has agreed to accept some written answers from Trump regarding the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign worked with Russia amid the Kremlin’s election interference. 

Trump has repeatedly gone on the offensive against the Mueller probe, regularly trashing it as a “rigged witch hunt” and saying that there was “no collusion” with the Russians.

Updated at 9:20 a.m.