President Trump said Wednesday that despite reports over the last few months indicating he is going to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, “They’re still here.”
“They’ve been saying I’m going to get rid of them for the last three months, four months, five months, and they’re still here,” Trump said during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Trump stressed again there was no collusion between his campaign and Russian officials, and pointed to the investigation conducted by the House Intelligence Committee as evidence.
He also said he hopes Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election is “coming to an end,” as it is a “very, very bad thing” for the country.
“This is a hoax,” he said. “As far as the investigation, nobody has ever been more transparent. I have instructed our lawyers — be totally transparent. I believe we have given them 1.4 million pages of documents if you can believe this, and haven’t used, that I know of or for the most part, presidential powers or privilege.”
The president again accused Democrats of being “obstructionists” who created allegations of collusion as a means of “softening the blow” of their loss in the 2016 election.
“We want to get the investigation over with, done with. Put it behind us. We have to get back to business with negotiating with this gentleman and plenty of others,” he said of Abe. “But this gentleman is a very tough negotiator and we have to focus on that.”
Trump has reportedly been discussing firing Mueller and Rosenstein. Concerns about the president doing so amplified this month after the FBI raided the office, home, and hotel room of Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen.
Rosenstein reportedly personally signed off on the raid, and federal prosecutors obtained the search warrant for Cohen’s office after receiving a referral from Mueller.
