President Trump’s confidantes David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski recommended against the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller during a joint interview Wednesday with the Washington Examiner.
Bossie, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign manager during the latter period of the 2016 race, and Lewandowski, Trump campaign manager through most of the nomination fight, differ from some others in the president’s orbit who have urged him to sack Mueller. Trump recently signaled for the first time that he was open to the suggestion.
[Related: The White House thinks Trump can fire Robert Mueller. Washington wonders if he will]
“I think Bob Mueller’s investigation has to have a definitive end date to it. I think there is a fair time that he has had the opportunity to investigate any possible collusion or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. You can’t allow a special prosecutor — a special counsel — just to continue in perpetuity,” Lewandowski said, during a wide-ranging joint interview with Bossie for “Behind Closed Doors,” a Washington Examiner podcast.
“He has a responsibility to report back to Congress, using taxpayer money, and I think what he should do, and what the deputy attorney general should require, is a reasonable amount of time. I have now said I believe by June 1 of this year he should have finalized all of his interviews, whatever, whoever those people are, and be working on and writing his report to Congress, if that’s what he’s going to do. But there has to be a conclusion date, there has to be something.”
Mueller’s investigative team has not questioned either Bossie or Lewandowski, they confirmed during the podcast. The full interview is scheduled to air on Friday.
Mueller, appointed last year after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, is leading the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential contest and allegations that the president and his campaign colluded with Moscow to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Bossie and Lewandowski, who co-wrote the book Let Trump be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency, are in regular contact with the president, part of his constant communication with friends and informal advisers outside the White House. Trump uses the conversations as a sounding board, to hear reviews of how his actions are playing with voters and the media.
In that capacity, Bossie’s and Lewandowski’s opinions could influence a president who is quite mercurial and can shift his views based on the last person he spoke with. The two political operatives were still plenty critical of the Russia investigation, calling it a joke driven by lies drummed up by the Democratic Party.
Bossie said that Trump “fundamentally understands what is right and wrong. He understands better than anyone that this Russian collusion farce of an investigation — and I say that, but then I also say: It was fine for them to investigate it, because people brought allegations. You see if those allegations have any credit, merit, evidence and you continue to investigate it. But that has gone away.”
“The issue of Russia collusion is now gone. It never existed. It was never possible,” Bossie continued. “If it happened, which it did not in my opinion, in Corey’s opinion as well, it would have come out by now. … During the campaign, nothing of the sort happened. Was Paul Manafort a bad guy before he came to the campaign? I think the evidence is there. I’m not going to convict the guy, but it looks pretty bad for him and what Rick Gates did. But those issues had nothing to do with the campaign or Donald Trump.”
Manafort served as Trump’s top campaign adviser, with Gates working under him, after Lewandowski was pushed out but before Bossie, campaign CEO Steve Bannon, and campaign manager and now-White House counselor Kellyanne Conway were brought in. Both Manafort and Gates have been indicted as part of the Mueller investigation.
Looking ahead to 2020, Bossie previewed Trump’s possible campaign slogan, with the caveat that the president would end up making the final decision on strategy and messaging, as he always does.
“’What the hell do you have to lose?’ And the answer is going to be: ‘A lot, if I’m not re-elected,’” Bossie said, in a play on the message Trump carried to nonwhite voters in 2016. “Our national security is going to be put back in jeopardy, we’re going to go back to the smallest army, smallest navy, we’re going to have open borders and unchecked immigration polices, we’re going to have an economy that is, now we’re seeing at 3 percent growth, right? Barack Obama’s was, 1.6, 1.8.”
