Jonathan Turley predicted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking to wrap up his probe by the end of the year in an appearance on Fox & Friends Thursday.

“Do you think it’s almost over?” Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade asked the law professor.

“I think it is,” he replied. “I think that Mueller is looking at the end of the year to try to wrap things up. It makes sense to issue at least one report before the year end. If he waits until Congress comes, then it looks like he is feeding material to the Democrats.”

“So it would be better for him to get out a report before the end of the year,” he added.

Earlier in the interview, Turley called it a “very unfortunate move” for Trump to float a pardon for Paul Manafort, but noted that the president has reportedly issued a written statements denying he knew about the Trump Tower meeting in 2016 and that he spoke to Roger Stone about Wikileaks.

“Now, if he is lying then he should be impeached and removed,” Turley said. “If he is not, if Mueller finds there is no such evidence, then this whole narrative becomes more difficult to hold together.”

If Trump is telling the truth, Turley said, and “if he is obstructing justice, the question is why?”

“We’re beginning to see to get boiled down to some central questions,” he continued. “And those are true or false. Does Mueller have evidence that the president was involved in these things? When did the Trump officials, if at any time, know about the hacking before it was released?” Turley added that it’s not a crime for Stone to want to information from Wikileaks, and that Mueller would need more for a case.

Halfway through the interview, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy read out a fresh tweet from Trump bashing the Mueller probe as a “Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt” with a (fictional) price tag of $40 million.

“I’ve been a critic of the president’s tweets,” Turley reacted. “I don’t think these are helpful.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

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