When President Donald Trump lashed out against Robert Mueller by name earlier this month, the president’s supporters sprang into action — treating the chief Russia investigator to political campaign-style opposition research.

Within hours, the Drudge Report featured a story blaming Mueller, the special counsel leading the Justice Department’s Russia probe, for the FBI’s clumsy investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks when Mueller ran the bureau. The independent pro-Trump journalist Sara Carter posted a story charging that Mueller, as a federal prosecutor in Boston in the mid-1980s, had covered up the FBI’s dealings with the Mafia informant Whitey Bulger. Carter was soon discussing her findings in prime time with Fox News host Sean Hannity.


Meanwhile, Trump supporters on Twitter circulated video of testimony Mueller gave to Congress ahead of the 2003 Iraq War in which he endorsed the view, later proved false, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

To some, the barrage looked coordinated among pro-Trump allies and media outlets, a concerted effort to tarnish Mueller’s reputation as part of a political strategy to undermine, or even eventually fire, the Russia investigator.

“It looks like the beginnings of a campaign,” a source familiar with Trump’s legal strategy said. “It looks like they are trying to seed the ground. Ultimately, if the president determines he wants to fire Mueller, he’s going to want to make sure there’s ample public record that he can fall back on.”

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While Trump has long publicly denounced the Russia probe, and Mueller has been the target of criticism since he first began his work, both Democratic and Republicans observers say the latest wave of personal attacks on Mueller seem more barbed — and personal — than ever.

Even as they accuse the Justice Department and FBI of anti-Trump bias and unethical tactics, Trump’s conservative allies seem increasingly determined to undermine the personal credibility of Mueller, whom a new CNN poll shows has far more public support for his handling of the Russia probe, at 48 percent, than does the president, at 32 percent.

People close to the Russia probe call it a crucial moment when Trump swiped at Mueller by name for the first time earlier this month. Until then, the president had followed the advice of his lawyers and refrained from mentioning the special counsel in his online tirades about the “Fake News” and “WITCH HUNT!” of the Russia scandal.

But two Saturdays ago, Trump angrily tweeted that “[t]he Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime.”

“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?” he added the next morning.

Fueling the fire was a statement from his then-personal attorney John Dowd to a Daily Beast reporter saying that the Mueller investigation should be shuttered. Dowd later told POLITICO he had been speaking only for himself, but that claim met a skeptical reception.

Some suggest that, in taking off the gloves, the president was setting a new tone for discourse toward the special counsel at the same time his lawyers are trying to negotiate the terms for an interview with Mueller.

“This anti-Mueller wave feels different because it is being driven directly by the president,” said Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman for Breitbart News and for California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa.

One longtime Trump ally says what’s happening is clear.

“I think President Trump is going to war. I think it’s very obvious he’s going to war on this,” former Trump White House strategist Steven Bannon said last week during a Financial Times panel in New York.

Jay Sekulow, who is now serving as the president’s top personal attorney, declined comment except to say: “We are proceeding with our ongoing cooperation with the Office of Special Counsel.”

The attacks on Mueller may be starting to pay off. The special counsel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans hit a peak of 43 percent in a Morning Consult/POLITICO poll conducted in the days surrounding the president’s anti-Mueller tweets.

An open question is whether the ensuing wave of anti-Mueller attacks by Trump’s allies really is orchestrated — or just a reflexive response.

“They just activate,” Bardella said. “They don’t need to have a conversation or a meeting or a memo. They know once that signal comes they’re free to, as Steve Bannon would say, ‘Go buck wild.’”

Adam Gingrich, a former Pennsylvania-based Trump campaign operative, joined the fray earlier this month with a tweet declaring it “[t]ime to #RiseUp and #FireMueller,” Gingrich wrote, using hashtags that spread across conservative circles in the following days.

Fox News host Sean Hannity has targeted the the special counsel, devoting airtime to him each night last week.

On the Drudge Report, a live poll launched after Dowd’s comment quizzed visitors on whether Trump should fire the special counsel. After more than a week online, the poll had found 76 percent in favor of Mueller’s ouster.

On Fox News, Hannity gave Mueller a thorough drubbing too. During one of his podcasts last week, the conservative pundit questioned why Attorney General Jeff Sessions was recused from the Russia probe while deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “gets to appoint his buddy Robert Mueller?”

“If it’s the last act I do on this Earth I’m getting to the bottom of this,” Hannity said. “I’m not going to stop. Unless I have a stroke on the air and can’t talk or function, I’m going to keep going.”

Hannity also devoted television airtime to the special counsel each night last week, including an interview with Carter in which he asked her to elaborate on her story about Mueller’s work as a federal prosecutor in Boston and criticism that the FBI had withheld information about its interactions with Bulger, a former organized crime boss and federal government informant who evaded police for 16 years until his 2011 arrest.

“We’ve got to tell the story about Mueller,” she said. “We’re not hearing all the facts about Robert Mueller.”

The questions about Mueller’s record aren’t actually new. As the Senate prepared to consider President Barack Obama’s 2011 request for a two-year extension of his FBI term, Mueller faced criticism over both the Bulger episode and his role overseeing the anthrax attacks — in which the FBI under his leadership pursued the wrong person for several years, and the prime suspect committed suicide just as prosecutors were readying charges. But the complaints didn’t stop him from winning unanimous confirmation.

Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment.

“There’s no question he bears some of the responsibility about what happened” on the anthrax case, said Sol Wisenberg, a former deputy to Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr. “But still, so what? What does that have to do with? You’re going to make errors in your career if you’re working hard and being aggressive.”

The onslaught against Mueller has also tested the mood among congressional Republicans. It took a couple of days for House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to weigh in on the president’s attacks. And while both came to Mueller’s defense — Ryan said he’d gotten “assurances” the special counsel wouldn’t be fired, and McConnell called Mueller “an excellent appointment” — they stopped well short of rebuking Trump’s openly hostile tone.

“If Trump is trying to determine how far Congress will let him go, the silence becomes very important,” said Charlie Sykes, the frequent Trump critic and former conservative radio host from Wisconsin. “They could have shut this down almost immediately by saying this would be absolutely intolerable, this would cross a bright red line.”

“The fact neither McConnell or Ryan is not drawing a red line,” he added, “is potentially signaling a green light to Trump.”