"After one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead... ," President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Trump: Nunes memo 'totally vindicates' me

President Donald Trump said Saturday that the controversial memo written by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and other GOP lawmakers "totally vindicates" him — a judgment shared shared by few others in Washington.

"This memo totally vindicates 'Trump' in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on," the president wrote on Twitter. "Their [sic] was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead)."


Democrats and some conservatives said the memo did nothing to delegitimize special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation; if anything, some of them said it confirmed that the probe was not predicated on the anti-Trump dossier that the president and his allies have attacked.

The GOP memo, released on Friday, is based on previously classified material that GOP members of the House Intelligence Committee voted to make public, later receiving the backing of Trump. The document purports to show how FBI and Department of Justice officials abused their surveillance powers when they requested to track former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Trump also touted a Rasmussen poll showing that his approval rating had climbed to 49 percent, which he called "a far better number than I had in winning the Election, and higher than certain 'sacred cows.' Other Trump polls are way up also. So why does the media refuse to write this? Oh well, someday!"

Trump returned to the topic Saturday night, saying people want to talk only about "Russia, Russia, Russia" and not the current positive outlook of the economy. He later quoted from a Wall Street Journal editorial about the memo.