Trump: It’s a ‘witch hunt’
President expresses anger at appointment of a special counsel
But in attacking Wednesday’s appointment of former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III as a special counsel to head the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any role that Trump’s associates may have played, the president risks alienating potential supporters in his own party.
He could create an enemy out of a prosecutor who commands both a vast army of investigators and bipartisan respect.
And, yet again, he has undercut advice from top Republicans inside and outside the White House who say that an independent investigation could help Trump. If only he could control his evident anxiety about the case, the secrecy of a special counsel investigation could keep the story out of the daily headlines, they say. And Mueller’s credibility could provide exoneration for the president and his aides if the investigation finds that they have done nothing wrong.
The mix of grievance, hyperbole and defiance in Trump’s response fits a pattern he long ago established of fighting back against enemies real or perceived and of seldom letting go of a grudge.
In a second tweet, Trump complained that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had not been subjected to the same treatment.
“With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special counsel appointed!” he wrote. He initially misspelled counsel as “councel” before sending a corrected tweet.
Trump did not specify what he meant by illegal acts.
During a lunch with television anchors before a nine-day foreign trip that is scheduled to begin today, Trump continued to criticize the special counsel appointment. He called the investigation “a pure excuse for the Democrats” for losing the election. “It hurts our country terribly,” he said. “It shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not unified country.”
At a joint news conference later in the day with the visiting president of Colombia, Trump took a slightly more muted tone. “I respect the decision” to appoint Mueller, he said, before adding that he believed the “entire thing” was “a witch hunt.”
“There’s no collusion between, certainly, myself and my campaign — but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians — zero,” he said. He appeared to mean that he could “only” speak for himself.
“There is no collusion,” he repeated several times.
He also emphatically said, “No, no,” when asked whether he had urged then-FBI Director James B. Comey to back off an investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Comey, in a memo reportedly written for his files, said that Trump had made such a request at a meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14.
Trump and some of his advisers clearly see anger over the investigation as a way to unite his core supporters against a common enemy at a time when at least some of his voters have begun showing signs, in polls, of wavering.
In fundraising emails Thursday, Trump boasted that he had set a new post-election high for his campaign in online money raising despite “unrelenting and unprecedented political attacks against a sitting president” by the media and political establishment.
“The American people sent President Trump to Washington not to get along with the establishment but to repair the damage done to our economy and our prestige around the world by their policies and practices,” he wrote.
Trump’s instinct to battle, however, along with the political desire to use the fight to unite his supporters, is at odds with the strategy that many of his advisers would prefer — one closer to the approach other administrations have used of trying to insulate the White House’s daily functions from scandal.
Clinton’s press office hired an outside agency to handle questions about the investigation that eventually led to his impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Although it did not end his difficulties, it took some of the pressure off his White House staff, allowing them to speak more about policy during public briefings.
On Wednesday night, the White House seemed to be inching toward a similar goal, issuing a statement that offered muted approval of the investigation and urged a speedy conclusion.
Congressional Republican leaders appeared to be following that playbook Thursday.
After Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein briefed senators on the investigation, several GOP lawmakers suggested that with Mueller in place, the time had come for congressional committees to scale back their investigations, which involve highly public hearings, and allow the special counsel to carry out his inquiry, which can be expected to offer fewer headlines until it reaches a conclusion.
The appointment of Mueller “has really limited what Congress can do,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina. “This was a counterintelligence investigation. It is now a criminal investigation.”
With the rush of events at home, Trump’s overseas trip now promises to be even more fraught for the new president.
Trump would like the trip to be shorter, a White House official said. His son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, orchestrated the stops in Saudi Arabia and Israel, which lengthened a trip that originally was designed to go only to Italy and NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Trump liked the broader mission, but being away from a familiar bed for more than a week is difficult for him. He is often teased by his children as being a “homebody,” the official said.
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