Will the President sit down with Robert Mueller for a nice friendly chat?

With the rumors circulating that Special Counsel wants to interview the President, everyone and their brother has come up with opinions on whether or not he will (or should) agree to an interview.

My own knee jerk reaction was a fairly quick conclusion that he would do so, if for no other reasons than it would be the best public relations move with the general public. The President "not" agreeing to an interview will obviously be taken by many that he is "hiding" something. I also get a sense that this Special Counsel concluding without an interview with the President will ultimately feel less than "finished".

But I generally must confess that some of the arguments to the contrary are swaying me in the other direction. Most importantly, the arguments that I find compelling are coming from attorneys or people within the legal community, who quite obviously know this subject better than I.

To some degree it's a matter of weighing the upside vs the downside.

The upside to agreeing to an interview is mostly political. It would give the feeling that the President is open. forthright, and confident. There would be more "finality" to the process, and it would move more people past the entire affair.

The downside is that any interview with a group of experienced investigators and prosecutors could be little more than a perjury trap, with the sole attempt to get the President to say something "misleading".  Certainly that is the pitfall of the Mueller team charging two Trump associates with "making false statements". It becomes a warning to all others that prosecution is willing to push "process crimes" even in areas that are not necessarily the focus of the investigation. Had neither Papadopoulos or Flynn been charged with a process crime, it's unlikely that the President's lawyers would be pushing as hard to resist.

The upside of not agreeing to an interview would be that Mueller is either forced to back off the request or show his hand. If he wants to get a grand jury subpoena to talk to the President, he needs to either show probable cause that the President has committed a crime or show that the President will provide information that he cannot garner anywhere else. Ultimately, a refusal by the President and his attorneys is also a signal that they would be willing to fight a subpoena (all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary). The last thing Mueller would want is for a Court to rule that he has no due cause to even question the President. If he legally has no cause to question, he certainly has no cause to suggest the President committed a crime.

The downside of not agreeing is the optics. People will argue and many will believe that the President has something to hide. From that standpoint, Mueller could decide not to press things to a Grand Jury, play a bit of the martyr, and provides a somewhat empty P.R. win for his team. The other downside is the possibility that Mueller takes it a grand jury, garners the subpoena, and is able to successfully fight off any court challenges.

Many legal analyst are suggesting that the President is better off resisting a voluntary sit down interview. The argument is that the bar to garner a grand jury subpoena to interview a sitting President should be very high. Moreover, there is a feeling that Mueller is not ready to declare that the President is under criminal investigation, and that Mueller knows he would have a tough time convincing a series of judges that the interview is legally necessary to acquire otherwise unacquirable information.

As a compromise (to a avoid a fight that neither side probably wants) they may agree to have some form or written questions and answers as previous Presidents have done in similar circumstances. Another possibility would be the President and his attorneys be provided a full list of the questions that would be asked prior to an interview and that they agree to only answer those questions. Both of these options would appear to satisfy the Special Counsel's need to get answers, while simultaneously satisfying the President's legal team concern that the request for an interview is a perjury trap.