Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said he once took special counsel Robert Mueller “to task” at the Justice Department.
But Mueller was not present.
“I met with that guy once. Once. Every time I had a problem, somebody else had to meet him,” Giuliani said Thursday on Fox News. “Once, we had a crisis and we took him to task in the attorney general’s office — or the deputy attorney general’s office, and I blasted him. He didn’t show up. I saw him a year and a half ago. One and only time. I called him ‘the Wizard of Oz.’ We would say, you are doing this, you are doing that, it’s wrong. They would say, ‘We’ll take it up with Bob.’ I used to sometimes say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t wake him.'”
The former mayor of New York City did not elaborate further.
Giuliani has been making the cable news rounds after Mueller delivered a public address on Wednesday to announce his resignation and reiterate the findings of his 448-page report. Mueller’s team was unable to find sufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia and declined to make a determination on whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, although they did describe 10 instances that were examined.
Giuliani, who joined Trump’s legal team in April 2018, said Mueller was “stumbling and bumbling” during his public remarks, criticized the special counsel for not taking reporters’ questions, and called the 22-month-long investigation a “witch hunt.”
He also dared Mueller to testify before Congress, something the special counsel made clear he did not want to do in stressing that “the report is my testimony.”
“I dare [Mueller] to testify,” Giuliani said. “I’d love to see [Rep. Mark] Meadows and [Rep. Jim] Jordan cross-examine him on when did he find out there was no collusion? Exactly why would you hire Andrew Weissmann, who is the most notorious and unethical prosecutor of the last 20 to 30 years?”
