Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told President Trump last week that the president is not a target in the Michael Cohen investigation, and that the investigation is focused solely on Cohen, the president’s personal attorney, a source familiar with the probe told Fox News on Thursday.
Trump has been told previously that he is not a target of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The source also said the Cohen investigation, together with the abrupt departure of John Dowd from Trump’s legal team, slowed, but did not halt talks about Trump sitting down for a potential interview with Mueller.
The FBI last week raided the office, home and hotel room of Cohen. Federal agents reportedly obtained documents related to several issues, including Cohen’s payments to adult-film star Stormy Daniels in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
Separately, President Trump’s in-house counsel Ty Cobb said no firings are currently under consideration, including those of Rosenstein or Mueller.
Earlier Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Rosenstein told Trump that he was not being targeted in the wider Mueller probe.
According to Bloomberg, Rosenstein told Trump that he wasn’t being targeted during a Thursday meeting at the White House. The assurances reportedly led to waning interest on behalf of the president to fire Rosenstein and Mueller.
In an interview on Thursday with CNN, former FBI director James Comey addressed the reports about Rosenstein’s reported conversation with Trump.
“I don’t know what it means,” Comey said. “It’s a fairly standard part of any investigation, trying to decide whether a person you’re encountering is a witness, a subject or a target. A target is someone on whom the investigation, the grand jury has developed … evidence sufficient to charge. Witness is somebody who has nothing to do with any exposure and a subject is everybody in the middle. So, I don’t know the context in which the Deputy Attorney General did that, but that’s the general framework.”
This is a developing story; check back for updates.
Fox News’ John Roberts and Samuel Chamberlain contributed to this report.
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