Explaining President Trump’s attacks on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, the White House said Tuesday the president is frustrated with the “absurd process” but he will not fire the special counsel.
“We don’t feel like that’s the most productive step forward, but we would like to see this come to a conclusion,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the daily briefing Tuesday.
Trump tweeted Saturday that the investigation into allegations of collusion between his president campaign and Russia was a “witch hunt” that “should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime.” He accused the special counsel’s team of being comprised of “13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans.” Trump’s tweets were preceded by his personal lawyer, John Dowd, telling the Daily Beast he hopes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will shut down the probe.
Sanders defended Trump’s remarks, describing them as natural because he has done nothing wrong.
“If you had been attacked mercilessly and continuously day in, day out, every single second while you’re trying to work hard to do good things for this country, and literally every day you wake up to an onslaught of people saying you’re there because of reasons that are completely false, that’s frustrating,” she said.
Sanders criticized Republican lawmakers such as Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who told “Fox News Sunday” his advice to the president was: “If the allegations are colluding with the Russians and there’s no evidence of that and you are innocent of that, act like it.”
Sander said that to “pretend like going through this absurd process over a year would not bring frustration seems a little ridiculous.”
“I don’t think any individual, including members of Congress, would like it if they had been accused of taking their seat in Congress by doing something nefarious when they hadn’t, particularly if it went on for more than a year into their time in office,” she said.
“My guess is they would be more than anxious to push back and certainly would defend themselves as the president has clearly done that in this situation and has since day one,” Sanders added.
Assurances on Capitol Hill
Earlier Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan said the White House had assured him that Trump won’t fire Mueller.
“I received assurances that his firing is not even under consideration,” he said, according to the Washington Times.
Ryan expressed confidence Mueller will complete his investigation.
Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and several other Republican congressman have joined four GOP senators in calling for a second special counsel to investigate alleged bias and abuses at the FBI.
“We need somebody to look at this, and not from the inside because you can’t trust what’s happening right now,” said McCarthy in an interview with “Fox News Sunday.”
Earlier this month, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas wrote the Department of Justice asking for an investigation into the FBI’s relationship with the compiler of the anti-Trump dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele.
‘Irretrievably tainted’
David Schoen, a civil rights and defense attorney who has criticized the Mueller investigation, told investigative reporter Sara Carter the probe appears to be based, as least in significant part, on the unverified dossier, circumstantial evidence and the coordinated actions of political opponents.
He said the Mueller investigation “is irretrievably tainted from its inception and must end now.”
Schoen expressed surprise that lawmakers have lauded Mueller’s career, apparently having little knowledge of, among other problems, his years in Boston, challenges with the 911 Commission findings when he was first appointed to the FBI and bungling of the Anthrax case.
Former FBI director James Kallstrom said in a Fox Business interview Sunday that FBI investigators are “gnawing at the bit to get involved a real investigation, not a phony investigation like Jim Comey conducted.”
Kallstrom said ample evidence has been revealed over the past year that high-ranking FBI officials engaged in “a plot to not have Hillary Clinton indicted.”
He said President Obama’s State Department, national security adviser, deputy national security adviser and CIA director were among the participants in the plot to ensure Trump didn’t win in November 2016.
“I think it goes right to the top, quite frankly,” he said, meaning Obama.
The Obama administration, he said, had a “strategy.”
“They were going to win; nobody would ever know any of this stuff,” Kallstrom said.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Monday he believes the FBI is in “cover-up mode” while Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz examines how the agency and Justice Department handled the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s abuse of classified information.
Fitton said the concerns of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., regarding the FBI’s unwillingness to turn over to Congress more than 1 million missing documents are “well-founded.”
Horowitz has indicted to lawmakers he will release his report in March or April.
“[The FBI] is withholding material from us and not searching properly to find out what’s been going on with the FBI corruption as it relates to Hillary Clinton and the Russia collusion story,” Fitton said.
