With Putin by his side, Trump calls Mueller probe a 'disaster for our country'

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election “is a disaster for our country,” President Donald Trump said Monday as he stood side-by-side with the man the U.S. intelligence community has said ordered those efforts, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. president’s criticism of the Mueller probe comes days after the Justice Department handed down indictments of 12 officials from Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, accusing them of launching cyberattacks against two Democratic Party organizations and the presidential campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton.


To date, Mueller’s team, tasked not only with probing Russia’s election interference campaign but also allegations that the Trump campaign colluded in those efforts, has secured either indictments or guilty pleas from 32 individuals, including 26 Russian nationals and four Trump campaign advisers, as well as three Russian companies.

“The probe is a disaster for our country. I think it's kept us apart. It's kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it,” Trump said Monday at a bilateral news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Finland. “That was a clean campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily… It's a shame that there could even be a little bit of a cloud over it. People know that.”

The U.S. president complained that the Mueller investigation, which he has regularly characterized as a “witch hunt” invented by Democrats embarrassed about Clinton’s surprising 2016 loss, had driven a wedge between the U.S. and Russia. In an earlier post to his Twitter account, Trump wrote that “our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”

Both Putin and Trump said the two had discussed the Kremlin’s alleged election interference during the bilateral meeting that preceded Monday’s news conference, with the Russian president once again denying that his nation was guilty of the offenses that the U.S. intelligence community has unanimously accused it of with “high confidence.”

Asked if his nation would consider extraditing the 12 indicted Russian military intelligence officials named by Mueller’s team last week, Putin said he would “look into it.” Russia is widely expected not to extradite the officials.

The Russian president pointed to a U.S.-Russia treaty that allows for extraditions that he argued “works quite efficiently” and said Mueller’s team should issue a request via that treaty for the Russian government to hold the indicted individuals for questioning. Putin also offered to allow representatives from Mueller’s team to be present for such questioning, but said such a situation would require reciprocal treatment from the U.S.

“This kind of effort should be a mutual one,” Putin said. “Then we would expect that the Americans would reciprocate and they would question officials including the officers of law enforcement and intelligence service of the United States whom we believe are — who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia, and we have to request the presence of our law enforcement.”

The Russian president pointed specifically to the case of American Bill Browder, an investor whose anti-corruption attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and detained in Moscow and died after being held without trial for almost a year. Putin accused Browder’s associates of making money in Russia without paying taxes on it there or in the U.S. and donating it to Clinton’s campaign.

Browder has lobbied aggressively against the Russian government, pushing for the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law that imposed travel and economic sanctions on those believed to have been involved in the attorney’s death.

The Kremlin responded to the Magnitsky Act with its own package of sanctions, including a ban on the adoption of Russian children by U.S. families. It was that issue of adoptions that another Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, discussed with officials from the Trump campaign in June 2016, at a meeting that had been billed as an opportunity for the president’s campaign to obtain damaging information on Clinton sourced from the Russian government.

