Mueller investigators to question former Trump aide Sam Nunberg in Russian probe
Sam Nunberg, a former long-time campaign aide to President Donald Trump, is scheduled to appear before Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller in his probe of possible Russian interference with the 2016 president election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with that effort.
As FOX Business was first to report, Nunberg is due to be interviewed by Mueller’s team sometime this week. According to people with direct knowledge of the matter, Nunberg will travel to Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning for his meeting with Mueller’s team. These people say he will be accompanied by his attorney, Patrick Brackley Jr.
Nunberg is a colorful figure in Republican political circles. He was among president Trump’s earliest political advisers, working with long-time Trump aide Roger Stone in 2011 in helping the future president craft a nationalist message that would ultimately help him win the presidency. Nunberg may be best known as the architect of one of Trump most popular and controversial campaign promises: to build a wall along the Mexican border to discourage illegal immigration.
In 2015, Nunberg was fired from the campaign for racially insensitive Facebook posts, and he continued to make waves for his frequent criticism of his old boss on cable TV and for incendiary statements he made in several books about the campaign and the Trump presidency.
In Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Nunberg was said to have been tasked with explaining the U.S. Constitution to Trump, and got as far as the Fourth Amendment, “before (Trump’s) finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Brackley didn’t return a telephone call on Nunberg’s scheduled appearance; a spokesman for Mueller’s office declined comment; a White House spokeswoman had no comment.
It’s unclear what Nunberg might be about to provide the Mueller team as it continues to look into Russian meddling since he left early in the campaign. That said, interest in what Nunberg has to say shows the investigation is continuing despite statements from the president himself that it is coming to an imminent conclusion.
Nunberg is both a close associate of Stone and Steve Bannon, the former Trump senior adviser and until recently head of the conservative news operation Breitbart.com. Bannon is also cooperating with Mueller. Stone and Bannon had no immediate comment.
One area that Nunberg could shed light on for the special prosecutor’s office is when Trump began seriously considering running for president. Trump, in a recent tweet concerning Mueller’s indictments of 13 Russian nationals on charges of meddling in the election, said the effort was not connected to his campaign since it began in 2014, “long before” he decided to run for president. Trump officially announced he was running for president in June 2015 during a lavish ceremony at Trump Tower in New York City.
But Nunberg may be able to help the special prosecutor’s office determine that Trump was serious about running for president before that time and his intentions grew more serious as the Russians began overtly meddling in the U.S. political process through phony social media accounts that pushed a pro-Trump message and other measures laid out in the indictment.