For first time, Trump aims at Mueller

Source: Politico | March 18, 2018 | Andrew Restuccia and Brent D. Griffiths

The president escalates his rhetoric about the Russia probe and the FBI.

For 10 months, President Donald Trump and his team abided by a simple rule: Don’t go after special counsel Robert Mueller.

But this weekend, as he digested news that the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election was circling nearer to him and his family, Trump came closer than ever to abandoning his unspoken truce with Mueller, reigniting fears among Republicans that the president could fire the special counsel.

Cooped up in the White House without any public events on his schedule and cable news blaring, Trump unleashed a Twitter tirade that differed from past outbursts in one significant way: he mentioned Mueller directly. Before this weekend, Trump had only referenced Mueller by name once on Twitter, in a retweet.

Now, it appears, Mueller is fair game.

“The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime,” Trump tweeted Saturday night. On Sunday morning, he asked, “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?”

Some members of the special counsel’s team have donated to Democrats in the past, but it is false to claim that the entire team is made up of Democrats. Mueller himself is a Republican.

By Sunday afternoon, Trump had left the confines of the White House to visit his golf course in Virginia.

Until this weekend, Mueller was the rare figure in Trump’s orbit that seemed off limits. The president and his aides have taken pains to avoid attacking Mueller, even as they repeatedly stressed that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. “We’re going to continue to fully cooperate out of respect for the special counsel,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters earlier this week.

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