Trump rails against probe
In tweets, he sharpens attacks on Mueller, Comey and McCabe
Washington — President Donald Trump fired a barrage of angry statements Sunday railing against the Justice Department special counsel’s Russia investigation and attacking the integrity of former FBI Director James Comey and his former Deputy Andrew McCabe, charging that their notes from conversations with him are “Fake Memos.”
For the second straight day, Trump was unrestrained in his commentary about Robert Mueller’s expanding investigation, which is looking not only into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race and possible links to the Trump campaign, but also whether the president has sought to obstruct justice.
After Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, called Saturday for an end to the Mueller inquiry, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Sunday urged the president and his legal team to cooperate fully with the investigation and warned of serious ramifications if they did not.
In one of his tweets, Trump protested, “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added ... does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!”
The tweet overstates the partisan makeup of the special counsel’s team and falsely asserts that no Republicans are on it.
Mueller is a longtime Republican. He was nominated as FBI director in 2001 by a Republican president, George W. Bush, and was appointed special counsel by Rod Rosenstein, the Republican whom Trump picked to be deputy attorney general.
Publicly available voter registration information shows that 13 of the 17 members of Mueller’s team have previously registered as Democrats, while four had no affiliation or their affiliation could not be found. Nine of the 17 made political donations to Democrats, and their contributions totaled more than $57,000. The majority came from one person, who also contributed to Republicans. Six gave to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent.
Under instruction from his attorneys, Trump has in the past been careful not to publicly criticize Mueller by name or otherwise directly antagonize the special counsel, but rather to make more general criticisms. On Saturday night, in an apparent change of strategy, Trump for the first time tweeted the name of the special counsel.
“The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime,” Trump wrote. “It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”
The president’s attack came after Dowd called for an end to the Mueller investigation. He initially told the Daily Beast that he was speaking on behalf of the president, though he later backtracked and told The Washington Post that he was speaking only for himself.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, warned Trump that any interference in the Mueller probe would result in “a very, very long, bad 2018.”
“If you have an innocent client, Mr. Dowd, act like it,” Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Russia attacked our country. Let Special Counsel Mueller figure that out.”
Later, as if directly addressing the president, Gowdy said, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you should want the investigation to be as fulsome and thorough as possible.”
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, R, an informal adviser to Trump, said it would be inappropriate for the president to try to fire Mueller.
The special counsel has “conducted this investigation so far with great integrity, without leaking and by showing results, and I don’t think the president’s going to fire somebody like that,” Christie said on ABC’s “This Week.”