President Donald Trump has accused special counsel Robert Mueller for months of running a politically driven “witch hunt” against him.

The lead Russia investigator has now given the president and his allies fresh ammunition for that claim.


On Friday, Mueller rolled out new grand jury indictments against 12 Russian military officials for their role two years ago in allegedly trying to subvert American politics — just three days before Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, exposing the former FBI director to charges of playing politics with international diplomacy.

“It’s a big FU from Mueller,” a White House official said in an interview, speculating that it “wasn’t an accident” that the public rollout landed right before the Putin summit.

“This is just one more case of political malpractice,” added Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign adviser who remains close to the White House. “These guys all deserve to be indicted and deserve to be convicted. But to do it the Friday before the Monday meeting? Not so smart.”

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Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the Mueller probe, said he briefed Trump about the upcoming criminal charges earlier this week and insisted in a news conference that the timing of the indictments was “a function of the collection of the facts, the evidence, and the law and a determination that it was sufficient to present the indictment at this time.”

“I’ll let the president speak for himself,” Rosenstein responded when asked whether Trump supported the latest step in the 14-month-old Mueller probe. “Obviously, it was important for the president to know what information we've uncovered because he’s got to make very important decisions for the country. So, he needs to understand what evidence we have for election interference.”

Mueller’s moves on the eve of the Russia summit afforded Trump critics who have long questioned the president’s coziness with Moscow another opportunity to get a dig in.

“The timing is no accident,” said John Dean, the former Richard Nixon White House counsel whose public testimony about the Watergate cover-up helped bring down the Republican president. “It forces Trump to confront Putin. If he fails to do so he is admitting guilt. This story will now consume U.S.A. news, and blows up Trump’s claim it is all a witch hunt and hoax.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer jumped on the indictments by calling on Trump to skip the Putin meeting altogether “until Russia takes demonstrable and transparent steps to prove that they won’t interfere in future elections.”

“Glad-handing with Vladimir Putin on the heels of these indictments would be an insult to our democracy,” the New York Democrat said.

President Donald Trump will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Presidential Palace for the Helsinki Summit on July 16. | Emmi Korhonen/AFP/Getty Images

But the Trump-Putin summit is full steam ahead.

During a Friday news conference in Buckinghamshire, England, just hours before the Mueller indictments were released, Trump said he expected to talk with his Russian counterpart about a number of hot-button geopolitical issues, from Ukraine to Syria, Middle East peace and nuclear proliferation.

What happened in 2016 also would get an airing, Trump said.

“I will absolutely bring that up,” the president said. “I don’t think you’ll have any ‘Gee, I did it. I did it. You got me.’”

“There won’t be a Perry Mason here, I don’t think. But you never know what happens, right? But I will absolutely firmly ask the question,” Trump added.

Trump’s pledge to talk about Russian meddling represents the latest twist for the Republican, who has long toggled on the topic between seriousness and outright ridicule.

In July 2016, as Democrats gathered in Philadelphia to formally nominate Hillary Clinton and attempt to patch deep wounds from a bitter primary with liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders, Trump celebrated the release of hacked Democratic emails that only made the divisions worse. He also invited the Russians to hack Clinton and help find “the 30,000 emails that are missing” from the private server she used during her time as secretary of State.

During his first debate with Clinton that September, Trump cast doubt on the intelligence reports saying Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee, saying it could have also been the work of China or even “somebody sitting on their bed, that weighs 400 pounds.”

“Maybe there is no hacking,” Trump said a few weeks later, during the second debate. After his upset election win over Clinton, Trump in late November 2016 called the discussion about Russian interference “a laughing point.”

As president, Trump has raised the topic with Putin before but has reported back that the Russian leader rejected the notion that he’d interfered with U.S. politics. “He vehemently denied it,” Trump wrote on Twitter last July after meeting with Putin in Germany. “He said he didn’t meddle. … I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Trump said last November after another sit-down with Putin in Asia.

Lindsay Walters, a Trump White House spokeswoman, referenced Rosenstein’s remarks during his news conference Friday, in which the Justice Department official explained there were no allegations in the Mueller indictments against any Americans for knowingly corresponding with Russian hackers or committing any crimes. “This is consistent with what we’ve been saying all along,” she said.

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, took his interpretation of the news a step further. On Twitter, he called the indictments “good news for all Americans” and urged the special counsel to end the probe soon.

“The Russians are nailed. No Americans are involved. Time for Mueller to end this pursuit of the President and say President Trump is completely innocent,” Giuliani wrote.

Giuliani’s predecessor, John Dowd, a former personal lawyer for Trump who has been a frequent outspoken critic of Mueller, said in an interview that the special counsel’s newest indictments weren’t a problem to him even though they were announced so close to the summit.

“To me, this is what they ought to be doing,” he said. “It’s the absolute correct thing to do, and I’m sure the president will bring it up with Putin.”

Several former federal prosecutors said Mueller’s latest move is a byproduct of his investigative schedule — not an attempt to influence the president’s summit.

“I doubt very seriously that the Mueller office has a large wall calendar in their war room that tracks all the nuances of the president’s busy schedule,” said Gene Rossi, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia. “The timing of this indictment is less a corrupt plot to embarrass the president during the Putin meeting than a scheduling coincidence.”

Peter Zeidenberg, who served as a deputy to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald during the George W. Bush-era investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, said Mueller’s team would be politicizing their work if they took the Putin summit into consideration.

“Announcing indictments when they are done, regardless of the news swirl, is being apolitical and entirely appropriate,” he added.

Mueller couldn’t win either way with his latest move, said David Weinstein, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Miami. “Had the indictment been released after the Putin summit, there would have been allegations that by keeping this under wraps it undermined the president’s abilities to have a conversation about the probe,” he said.

Andrew Restuccia contributed to this report.