For 10 months, President Donald Trump and his team abided by a simple rule: Don’t go after special counsel Robert Mueller.

But this weekend, as he digested news that the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election was circling nearer to him and his family, Trump came closer than ever to abandoning his unspoken truce with Mueller, reigniting fears among Republicans that the president could fire the special counsel.


Cooped up in the White House without any public events on his schedule and cable news blaring, Trump unleashed a Twitter tirade that differed from past outbursts in one significant way: He mentioned Mueller directly. Before this weekend, Trump had only referenced Mueller by name once on Twitter, in a retweet.

Now, it appears, Mueller is fair game.

“The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime,” Trump tweeted Saturday night. On Sunday morning, he asked, “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?”

Some members of the special counsel's team have donated to Democrats in the past, but it is false to claim that the entire team is made up of Democrats. Mueller himself is a Republican.

By Sunday afternoon, Trump had left the confines of the White House to visit his golf course in Virginia. Later Sunday, the White House said that there were no plans to fire Mueller.

“In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the Administration,“ attorney Ty Cobb said in a statement, “the White House yet again confirms that the President is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller.”

Until this weekend, Mueller was the rare figure in Trump’s orbit who seemed off-limits. The president and his aides have taken pains to avoid attacking Mueller, even as they repeatedly stressed that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. “We’re going to continue to fully cooperate out of respect for the special counsel,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters last week.

Trump’s comments come after his lawyer, John Dowd, on Saturday urged Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to shutter Mueller’s investigation. Dowd reportedly first told The Daily Beast he was speaking in his capacity as Trump’s lawyer, but he later backtracked, insisting he was speaking only for himself.

A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment. Sanders did not respond to questions about whether Trump would fire Mueller.

Firing Mueller would set off a firestorm in Washington, likely triggering a severe backlash against the president even among his Republican supporters in Congress.

“If he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency, because we're a rule-of-law nation,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. The senator issued the same warning last summer after Trump raised the same alarms.

A person familiar with the president’s thinking on the Mueller probe told POLITICO on Sunday that Trump’s tweets over the previous 48 hours appeared to be a response to the firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, news of the Trump Organization subpoena, and what he’s been hearing from his friends outside his immediate circle of staffers and attorneys.

“We know he’s obsessed with this case. He’s been obsessed with it from Day One, since before the special counsel’s been appointed,” the person said. “We know he actually enjoys talking about it because it goes to his nature. It goes to what he knows best: a fight.”

The person downplayed the notion that Trump’s tweets are the result of a strategic push by the president’s lawyers and advisers to undercut Mueller.

“[Trump] trusts his own instincts. He trusts it above the instincts of his own lawyers. He trusts it above the instincts of his own communications team, whether inside or outside the White House,” the person said.



Playbook PM Sign up for our must-read newsletter on what's driving the afternoon in Washington. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Meanwhile, Trump also suggested Sunday morning that McCabe, who was fired Friday, did not make memos of their conversations in person and that such documents, if they do exist, could be "fake."

"Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me," the president wrote on Twitter. "I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?"

On Saturday, POLITICO reported that McCabe, like former FBI Director James Comey, felt the need to memorialize his conversations with the president before he was fired on Friday. The former top FBI official has also given the memos to Mueller's team, as it continues to probe Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The president also continued his attacks on Comey, who is set to release a book soon.

“Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source ... or known someone else to be an anonymous source...?’ He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends.“

Seizing on a point made in conservative media, including by Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, Trump claimed that Comey lied under oath during his testimony to Congress last June. The former director's testimony has receive renewed attention over reports that McCabe, who was fired for for unauthorized disclosure to the media, may have done so with Comey's knowledge or blessing.

If Comey were to have authorized McCabe to speak to the media, it could contradict what the former director told Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) during his testimony.

"Director Comey, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?" Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, asked last summer, according to a transcript of the hearing.

"Never," Comey responded.

The Iowa senator asked again: "Question two, relatively related, have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?"

"No," Comey said.

While Trump has frequently blasted the Russia probe, he had steered clear of attacks on Mueller, even once calling him “an honorable man” in a Fox News interview.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday that the president may have a point when it comes to the number of Democrats on Mueller's team, but he largely praised the special counsel for limiting leaks and for the detailed information included in the Feb. 16 indictment of 13 Russian nationals and other businesses for their alleged role in interfering with the election.

"It is odd the number of Democrats that he has put on board his team," Lankford told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week." "That does raise some flags in some sense there."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer argued that the president is "floating trial balloons" to derail Mueller's probe.

"The president is floating trial balloons about derailing the Mueller investigation," the New York Democrat said in a statement. "Our Republican colleagues, particularly the leadership, have an obligation to our country to stand up now and make it clear that firing Mueller is a red line for our democracy that cannot be crossed."

Rep. Adam Schiff, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” said the idea of Mueller being fired was something that needed to be condemned before it could happen.

“Members need to speak out now,” the California Democrat said of his colleagues in Congress. “Don't wait for the crisis.”

Trump’s comments came at the end of a chaotic week that also saw the president fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and leave national security adviser H.R. McMaster dangling in the wind.

A defense lawyer working with a senior Trump aide on the Russia case said in an email that the president’s latest assault on Mueller “seems to me to be of a piece with the firing of Tillerson and the trash chute on which McMaster has been placed (not enough to just fire someone, you need to publicly humiliate them for a few weeks first), namely, Trump unshackled.”

“He appears to believe that — across the board — his instincts are better than those around him who have been exerting a moderating influence,” the lawyer added. “It's no secret where Trump stands on Mueller and, so, no particular surprise that this is coming now. And, as at the White House more generally, there are always those — in this case, Dowd —who are ready to reaffirm his (worst) impulses and act on them.”

Josh Gerstein and David Cohen contributed to this report.