President Donald Trump on Thursday called Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team “a disgrace to our Nation” and said that the investigators “don’t care how many lives [they] ruin.” | AP Photo/Andrew Harnik White House Trump revives personal attacks against Mueller team

President Donald Trump erupted at special counsel Robert Mueller on Twitter on Thursday morning, calling the special counsel's Russia probe a “witch hunt like no other in American history,” lashing out at Mueller’s team and firing off baseless accusations of corruption as the White House reportedly negotiates whether and when the president will provide a written response to questions from investigators.

Trump called the investigation, which is focused on whether Trump or his 2016 campaign team conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, “a total mess,” and claimed that the special counsel’s office has “found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts.”


Trump’s broadsides against the Mueller investigation are some of the most direct in recent weeks, reviving past attacks against Mueller’s time as FBI director in the Obama administration and calling for the investigation of “bad acts and crimes on the other side.”

Mueller’s team is “screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want,” Trump claimed, without elaborating.

One of the president’s attorneys, Rudy Giuliani, said last week that Trump’s legal team had prepared written responses for him to review, and said that Trump needed to decide whether or not to send the responses to Mueller’s team. That decision was likely to come sometime this week, once Trump returned from his weekend trip to Paris, he said.

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Giuliani confirmed that Mueller’s questions dealt solely with the time before Trump was sworn into office, rather than whether or not Trump sought to obstruct justice and upend the investigation.

Whether Trump would respond to questions from the special counsel has been a point of negotiation for over a year, as Trump has insisted he wants to sit for an interview, a move his legal team has advised against out of fear that the president might perjure himself. The disagreement over how to approach an interview with Mueller reportedly prompted one of his top lawyers, John Dowd, to resign earlier this year.

Trump on Thursday called Mueller’s team “a disgrace to our Nation” and said that the investigators “don’t care how many lives [they] ruin.”

In another set of tweets, Trump returned to an old and debunked line of attack to suggest that Mueller’s lack of Senate confirmation as special counsel made him ineligible to oversee the probe. He also lobbed an accusation, without evidence, that Mueller, whose mandate is to investigate Russian interference, is protecting “all of his friends on the other side,” listing off former FBI officials he views as corrupt, as well as his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton.

“Universities will someday study what highly conflicted (and NOT Senate approved) Bob Mueller and his gang of Democrat thugs have done to destroy people,” Trump wrote.

Trump’s Twitter flurry continued with a post calling instead for an investigation of Democrats for “collusion” and of “biased” sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google.