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!”
Andrew McCabe's firing met heated reactions, with supporters calling the special counsel's probe "corrupted" and opponents criticizing the firing as "petty."(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
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 the Republican whom Trump picked to be deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein.
At least seven of the 17 lawyers brought on by Mueller — including James Quarles, Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Weissman — have donated to Democratic political candidates, five of them 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 comes after Dowd called for the Mueller investigation to end. 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.”
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) warned that a move by Trump to order the firing of Mueller would be a step too far for lawmakers. “If he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency because we’re a rule-of-law nation,” Graham said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat, said he is concerned about “a constitutional crisis in this country.”
“This president is engaged in desperate and reckless conduct to intimidate the law enforcement agencies in this country and to try and stop the special counsel,” Durbin said on “Fox News Sunday.” “That is unacceptable in a democracy.”
