President Trump took to Twitter early Sunday to again attack special counsel Robert Mueller.
“The illegal Mueller Witch Hunt continues in search of a crime. There was never Collusion with Russia, except by the Clinton campaign, so the 17 Angry Democrats are looking at anything they can find. Very unfair and BAD for the country. ALSO, not allowed under the LAW!” said Trump in a tweet.
The illegal Mueller Witch Hunt continues in search of a crime. There was never Collusion with Russia, except by the Clinton campaign, so the 17 Angry Democrats are looking at anything they can find. Very unfair and BAD for the country. ALSO, not allowed under the LAW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 16, 2018
Mueller, the sixth director of the FBI, took over the federal government’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible connections to the Trump campaign in May 2017.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller after Attorney General Jeff Sessions consulted Justice Department ethics lawyers, and recused himself from the investigation due to previously undisclosed conversations with Russian officials.
In appointing Mueller, Rosenstein said “public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence.”
Trump has long attacked the Russia investigations, calling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” and making other accusations that it is made up of Democrats who simply want to take him down. Mueller is a registered Republican.
Mueller has brought more than 180 criminal charges in his more than a year-long investigation. Most recently, his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of bank and tax fraud crimes in Virginia, and took a plea deal of conspiracy charges in Washington.
Manafort’s defense team in both cases attempted to get the charges thrown out by challenging the constitutionality of Mueller, however both federal judges denied the attempt.
In his June ruling, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III wrote that Manafort’s attorneys did not make a sufficient legal argument to toss the case.
“The special counsel’s appointment was consistent with both constitutional requirements regarding appointment of officers and statutory requirements governing the authority to conduct criminal litigation on behalf of the United States, the special counsel had legal authority to investigate and to prosecute this matter and dismissal of the superseding indictment is not warranted,” Ellis, an appointee by former President Ronald Reagan, wrote.
However, Ellis did admit “that conclusion should not be read as approval of the practice of appointing special counsel to prosecute cases of alleged high-level misconduct.”
“Here, we have a prosecution of a campaign official, not a government official, for acts that occurred well before the Presidential election. To be sure, it is plausible, indeed ultimately persuasive here, to argue that the investigation and prosecution has some relevance to the election which occurred months if not years after the alleged misconduct. But in the end, that fact does not warrant dismissal,” Ellis added.
