Trump lashes out at Mueller probe as release of report approaches – POLITICO

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President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month long investigation was a “total waste of time.” | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

White House

04/06/2019 02:50 PM EDT

Updated 04/06/2019 04:09 PM EDT


President Donald Trump took to Twitter Saturday to attack the latest barrage of investigations and subpoena threats from his political opponents on Capitol Hill.

In his Saturday tweets, the president repeated claims that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller was run by “13 Angry Trump hating Dems” who found no wrongdoing on his behalf after spending “$30 million” over the course of the investigation. He added that the 22-month long probe was a “total waste of time.”

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His tweets come amid reports that some members of the special counsel’s team have been frustrated by the way U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr cast their findings in the summary he submitted to Congress late last month.

This week, the House Judiciary, Intelligence and Oversight committees have all ramped up probes into different aspects of Trump’s financial history, policy agenda and campaign, and Trump was hit Thursday with a formal request from Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) for his individual tax returns dating back to 2013.

The oversight escalation on Capitol Hill comes as Democrats continue to demand an unredacted copy of Mueller’s approximately 400-page report, which was provided to Attorney General Bill Barr more than two weeks ago. That request shows congressional Democrats “will never be satisfied,” Trump stated Saturday.

But as Barr’s self-imposed deadline to submit a copy of Mueller’s report to Capitol Hill fast approaches, Trump’s confidence in its “complete and total exoneration” of him has waned, according to one Republican close to the White House.

“He wouldn’t be bringing this up still if everything was hunky dory,” this person said, referring to the president’s tweets about Mueller and his team of federal investigators.

White House officials, Trump campaign aides and Republican lawmakers have all cited Barr’s four-page summary of the special counsel’s conclusions as an exoneration of Trump, who was cleared of conspiracy with Russia to sway the 2016 presidential election and did not face obstruction of justice charges due to insufficient evidence, according to Barr.

“I have not read the Mueller Report yet… Only know the conclusions, and on the big one, No Collusion,” Trump wrote on Twitter, hours before he was set to address a crowd of supporters and deep-pocketed GOP donors at the annual Republican Jewish Coalition summit in Las Vegas.

In separate reports late Wednesday, both The New York Times and The Washington Post described a band of investigators who believed the results of their probe into the president and his associates were far more damaging than Trump’s attorney general made them out to be. The same individuals have reportedly become worried that public opinion is being formed around an incomplete description of what they found, according to the Times.

Trump slammed the Times’ reporting as “fake news” in a tweet on Friday, shortly before departing Washington for a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border to highlight a newly renovated section of the current barrier that exists.

“The New York Times had no legitimate sources, which would be totally illegal, concerning the Mueller Report. In fact, they probably had no sources at all!” he wrote on Twitter.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about the president’s tweets on Saturday.

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/06/trump-mueller-probe-1260078

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