Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani denounced special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as "one-sided" and "infected" with bias. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images White House Trump allies assail Mueller report even as they defend its conclusions

President Donald Trump’s allies fanned out in his defense on Sunday, taking a confrontational stance about the Mueller report and maintaining that even though the report did not lead to the president’s indictment, it was biased and built on a foundation of inappropriate logic and conduct.

Their combative tone, struck in a string of interviews across cable news, indicates that even as Trump and his allies have claimed exoneration, they are gearing up for another drawn-out fight. And the arguments they made previewed a line of defense as Congress prepares to pick up where Mueller left off — though Democrats continued to tread lightly on the issue of impeachment ahead of a strategizing huddle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday.


Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani sparred with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union,” while senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, speaking with ABC’s Martha Raddatz, defended the president and found fault with the way the report was presented.

“That entire report, and the way you just presented it, is all from the point of, ‘Let's see if we can hang Donald Trump,’” Giuliani told Todd.

“Go to Page 2 of the obstruction thing. The president’s got to prove he’s innocent. They have to be convinced that he didn’t do it. When is that the standard ever in America? How can you prove a negative?”

For Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, the investigation itself was the crime.

“Where’s the interest now,” he said on NBC, “in trying to figure out how could it be that the FBI investigated this in two separate investigations, used four wiretaps in order to do it, four electronic surveillances, talked to 500 witnesses, spent $40 million, and the answer is there was no — not the slightest bit of evidence of conspiracy between Trump, anyone on the Trump campaign and the Russians? That was the story. Not this stuff which is underneath it.”

Giuliani argued that it was misleading for Trump’s critics to point out that Mueller hadn’t exonerated the president in declining to bring charges against him for collusion or obstruction of justice.

“Exoneration means proving a negative,” Giuliani said to Wallace, calling the notion that Mueller’s report would need to exonerate Trump a “biased, warped view of a prosecutor’s role.”

Conway also took issue with many of Trump’s critics, as well as media reports, that have focused on the report’s explicitly noting that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

“The word exoneration was unnecessary in the Mueller report, and I would say inappropriate,” she said, adding: “You either prosecute or you don’t. You either bring an indictment or you don’t.”

Despite her quarrels with Mueller’s phrasing, Conway contended that the mere lack of charges against the president was exoneration in itself.

“The job of a prosecutor is to gather evidence and decide whether to indict or to decline to indict,” she told Raddatz. “They declined to indict. The president is not going to jail, he’s staying in the White House for five and a half more years. Why? Because they found no crime, no conspiracy. That was the central premise.”

Though he said there would be no rebuttal from the president’s team just yet, Giuliani continued to question the report’s findings on obstruction even while lauding its findings that no one on the Trump campaign conspired to collude with Russia to sway the 2016 election.

“A lot of things left off, a lot of things are false — I shouldn’t say a lot of things. Some things are false, a lot of things are questionable,” he said of the report.

On Sunday, Giuliani and Conway appeared to have settled on a similar line of attack going forward, questioning the credibility of those who played a key role in Mueller’s crafting of the obstruction portion. Trump previewed that argument on Friday, calling some of what his aides told Mueller “total bullshit.”

Giuliani and Conway both zeroed in Sunday on the testimony of someone who made frequent appearances in Mueller’s report: former White House Counsel Don McGahn, who spent 30 hours with the special counsel’s team.

According to the report — which Giuliani denounced as “one-sided” and “infected” with bias, despite hailing it for clearing the president legally — Trump asked McGahn to inform Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Mueller was too conflicted to serve as special counsel, just days after media reports revealed that the special counsel was looking into whether Trump obstructed justice and for the first time was personally a target of the investigation. McGahn said he took this to mean Trump was asking him to remove Mueller from the investigation.

McGahn declined to fire Mueller, instead threatening to resign rather than do so, putting him in the company of numerous other presidential aides who shut down Trump’s attempts to thwart the investigation.

“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the report states.

Trump’s team has pointed out that Trump never explicitly ordered McGahn to act, and that he told several slightly differing versions of the episode.

It’s an argument the president’s allies have fallen back on a number of times, including to dispute former FBI Director James Comey’s interpretation of Trump’s telling him to go easy on then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was also embroiled in the probe.

In his interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Giuliani asserted that McGahn’s account was not credible enough to hypothetically be put in front of a jury.

“The guy has three different versions of something as important as this?” he asked. “You say I can’t rely on it.”

Giuliani added of McGahn: “I’m telling you, he’s confused.”

Though Giuliani seemed resigned to a congressional investigation of obstruction, he cast doubt on whether lawmakers could legally make a determination on whether Trump’s firing of Comey and his attempts to fire Mueller amounted to obstruction.

“If they’re gonna review his removal power,” he said, there’s a “real question under Article 2 whether they can do that. The Constitution of the United States give the Congress a role in appointment, advise and consent; it deliberately doesn’t give them a role in removal because they say, go back to the Constitutional Convention, that would be too much of an intrusion.”

Even so, Giuliani contended about the possibility of removing Mueller, “had he done it, it would not have been obstruction of justice” because “there were very good reasons” to dismiss the special counsel due to perceived bias and conflicts of interests on Mueller’s team.

And, he continued, Trump would have known that firing Mueller would not have halted the investigation because of its continuing under different leadership when Trump fired Comey. On CNN, he accused investigators of not interviewing witnesses who would have backed up the Trump team’s version of events.

“The second version is about as close to the truth as you’re going to get I think,” Giuliani said on CNN. “But the reality is there are independent witnesses they didn’t bother to interview who would say at that time the president was not taking the position that Mueller should be fired. In fact, Mueller was reassured he wouldn’t be fired. Those witnesses were not interviewed. Second, there are witnesses that dispute — a witness that disputes whether that’s correct.”

Despite Giuliani’s insistence that only Trump’s firing of Comey and his attempted removal of Mueller were in question regarding obstruction, the special counsel’s report lays out eight other episodes where the president potentially obstructed justice.

McGahn responded to the barrage of criticism over the weekend, telling NBC News he stood by his recollection of the episode, declaring that it was accurately described in the report and calling it a “mystery why Rudy Giuliani feels the need to re-litigate incidents the attorney general and deputy attorney general have concluded were not obstruction.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which would be in charge of kicking off impeachment proceedings, said on Sunday that he planned to call McGahn to testify about his time in the White House. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who chairs the House Oversight Committee, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he, too, wanted to hear from McGahn.

In his report, Mueller appeared to punt the issue of obstruction to lawmakers, writing that his office did not seek to make a “traditional prosecutorial decision” on obstruction because of longstanding Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.

However, the report says: “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

Nadler on Friday issued a subpoena for the unredacted report and its underlying evidence, including grand jury information, even though, he said on Sunday, the redacted version contained “plenty of evidence of obstruction.”

He also denied that Democrats had already moved to open an impeachment inquiry.

“I don’t think we’re doing that,” Nadler said on “Meet the Press.” “We may get to that. We may not. As I’ve said before, it is our job to go through all the evidence, all the information we can get.”

Despite calls from a growing number of prominent voices — including two Democratic presidential candidates, Julian Castro and Sen. Elizabeth Warren — to initiate impeachment proceedings, Cummings and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, urged caution at barging ahead with such a divisive case.

Schiff, on Fox, called it “a very difficult decision.”

“We’re going to have a caucus about this over the next couple weeks to try to figure out what the best course is. Not for the party, but what’s the best course for the country,” he said, dinging Republicans, who have remained resolute in their opposition to impeachment. “I think it’s certainly the case that an impeachment would be unsuccessful if the Republican Party continues to place party above country, continues essentially to back the president no matter how unethical or dishonest his conduct may be, and sadly, that’s where we are right now.”

But he and Cummings both warned against inaction, with Schiff arguing that it might “signal that somehow this president’s conduct is OK, that future presidents can engage in this kind of corruption without consequence.”

Cummings worried that not taking any action would only “embolden” Trump, and said he wouldn’t rule out impeachment.

“I’m not — I’m not there yet, but I can foresee that possibly coming,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“There comes a point in life where we all have to make decisions based upon the fact that it is our watch,” he said. “And, you know, history, I think even if we did not win possibly, if there were not impeachment, I think history would smile upon us for standing up for the Constitution.”