On Mueller, Trump tries to tweet his cake and eat it too
Even while claiming vindication from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which he hasn’t seen, President Trump continued to carry out shifting attacks against the investigation, one he has deemed an “illegal Democrat Witch Hunt of your all time favorite duly elected President.”
"The collusion illusion is over," Trump declared last week at his first campaign rally after Attorney General William Barr’s summary announced no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. But neither the president nor Democrats are moving on.
In the week since Barr released his summary of the two-year investigation, which found no collusion but fell short of determining obstruction of justice, Trump on a near-daily basis has boasted that the report is proof of his “complete and total exoneration” while simultaneously denouncing its credibility.
“Everybody is asking how the phony and fraudulent investigation of the No Collusion, No Obstruction Trump Campaign began. We need to know for future generations to understand,” Trump tweeted Sunday.
And Democrats agree that the country needs to know more about the report. In an ensuing battle over the report and its release to Congress and the public, Democrats have demanded that Barr testify immediately and release the full, unredacted report. Barr said the report can be redacted and ready for release by mid-April. He has agreed to testify in May.
“No matter what information is given to the crazed Democrats from the No Collusion Mueller Report,” Trump said in a later tweet, “it will never be good enough.”
Because all the public has seen so far is Barr’s brief summary, it’s unknown whether the Democrats in Congress will be satisfied if their demand to see the full report is met.
Trump also went after the media, calling for some outlets’ Pulitzer Prizes to be taken away, and his campaign sent a memo to television producers suggesting they ban several former and current government officials from speaking on their shows, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
“There is no amount of testimony or document production that can satisfy Jerry Nadler or Shifty Adam Schiff,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday, coining yet another derisive nickname for Schiff, whom he previously mocked as “pencil neck” and whose surname he once misspelled in a tweet with two t’s, turning it into a scatological epithet. “It is now time to focus exclusively on properly running our great Country!”
Rep. Nadler, D-N.Y., intends to push for the unredacted Mueller report via subpoena, which the judiciary committee will vote on Wednesday to authorize or not.
Trump blasted Nadler’s demands for the report, comparing them to the chairman's opposite treatment of independent counsel Ken Starr’s report on the investigation of then-President Bill Clinton.
“In 1998, Rep.Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton. No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!” Trump said via Twitter Tuesday.
After the Starr investigation ended, Nadler was critical of Clinton but said the report was “grand jury material” and included “all kinds of material that it would be unfair to release.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Schiff, D-Calif., whom Trump recently called on to resign, has been one of the most outspoken skeptics of Barr’s conclusions and maintains his stance that there is still “significant evidence of collusion” in the 2016 presidential election.
“Now that the long awaited Mueller Report conclusions have been released, most Democrats and others have gone back to the pre-Witch Hunt phase of their lives before Collusion Delusion took over,” wrote Trump on Twitter Monday. “Others are pretending that their former hero, Bob Mueller, no longer exists!”
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