“The end result was wrong. There was total bias," President Donald Trump said of the report from his Justice Department. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo Mueller steamrolls Trump’s campaign against him The president and his allies are calling for Mueller’s probe to stop after the DOJ watchdog report. But Mueller is showing no signs of slowing down.

President Donald Trump and his allies seized Friday on the Justice Department inspector general’s report into the Hillary Clinton email investigation to claim special counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling probe is corrupt and must end.

Try telling that to Mueller.


Hours after the president thundered from the White House North Lawn about a Mueller probe that “has been totally discredited,” the special counsel’s team chalked up another win when a federal judge ordered Paul Manafort be sent to jail over accusations of witness tampering ahead of the former Trump campaign chairman’s upcoming criminal trial.

Despite Trump’s complaints, Mueller remains very much on the clock. He’s now more than a year into his examination of Moscow meddling in the 2016 election with no deadline to finish his work. And he continues to haul witnesses under subpoena before the grand jury while potential lines of investigation remain open not just involving Trump himself but also his namesake company, the Trump Organization, and longtime associates such as political operative Roger Stone and personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

“Mueller is simply going to continue to hunker down and do his job,” said Sol Wisenberg, a former deputy on Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton. “And the president, in the attacks on Mueller, is continuing to act like a person who has something to hide.”

Trump’s wrath was on display Friday morning with an extraordinary, impromptu and lengthy interview outside the White House on “Fox & Friends,” in which an invigorated president said he was vindicated in firing James Comey because the former FBI director committed “criminal” acts, that the watchdog report wrongly concluded there was not political bias against him, and that he may not stay uninvolved in the Justice Department’s activities much longer.

He also falsely claimed the DOJ watchdog report “totally exonerates” him.

“I think Comey was the ringleader of this whole den of thieves. It was a den of thieves,” the president said in the early morning interviews. “They were plotting against my election. Probably it's never happened like that in terms of intelligence and in terms of anything else — but they were actually plotting against my election.”

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But the president’s comments were soon overtaken by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s decision to revoke Manafort’s bail and order him to jail.

“You have abused the trust placed in you six months ago,” the judge said, referring to Manafort’s initial release under house arrest last October, when he was first charged by Mueller with money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent.

At the White House, Trump on Friday morning had tried to downplay his relationship with Manafort even though the longtime Republican operative had been hired specifically to help him secure his party’s presidential nomination amid fears of a contested 2016 convention and for about two critical months was in charge of the entire operation.

“Like Manafort has nothing to do with our campaign,” Trump told reporters who had gathered next to the Fox TV set and peppered him with questions after his television interview was finished. Referring to the charges against Manafort, the president added, “I feel a little badly about it. They went back 12 years to get things that he did 12 years ago?”

On Friday afternoon, Trump complained the judge’s decision to jail Manafort was “very unfair.”

“Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns,” Trump tweeted. “Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!”

In the earlier interviews, Trump also sidestepped questions about his pardon powers — he’s already given several controversial reprieves and last week insisted he has the “absolute right” to pardon himself. The prospect of more pardons is under active discussion in the White House and it remains of much interest to the likes of current and former aides and associates who have been swept up by the Mueller probe.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Trump responded when asked if he was considering a reprieve for Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser who has already pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI, or others. “But look, I do want to see people treated fairly. That’s what it’s all about.”

In an interview with the New York Daily News on Friday, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani said pardons were on the table. “When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons,” he said, adding he didn’t understand the reasoning for jailing Manafort.

“You put a guy in jail if he’s trying to kill witnesses, not just talking to witnesses,” Giuliani said.

During his “Fox & Friends” interview, Trump wasn’t as reluctant to opine on whether Comey should go to prison. “I said on the Department of Justice, I would stay uninvolved. Now, I may get involved at some point if it gets worse. I’m saying I’m staying uninvolved. I’m letting this report go through. I did nothing wrong. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. There was no anything.”

Trump’s media tour Friday morning was just one element of a full-court press in the wake of the IG report, which laced into Comey for violating protocol but did not find that political bias tainted the FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server. And despite Trump’s claims of total vindication, the report did not touch on the validity of Mueller’s probe into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials meddling in the presidential election and into whether Trump tried to obstruct justice.

Still, Trump said the report showed that he was right to fire Comey and that the move was not an attempt to interfere in the FBI’s Russia probe.

“The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI,” Trump tweeted Friday morning. “Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI. I did a great service to the people in firing him. Good Instincts. Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!”

Meanwhile, the president’s closest allies made the case that the bias of high-level FBI officials like Peter Strzok — the agent whose anti-Trump text messages were unearthed as part of the watchdog report — had seeped into the special counsel’s investigation of the president and poisoned federal prosecutors’ work.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, for example, demanded on Friday that the special counsel halt his work. And though Mueller booted Strzok from his team of top investigators in July after it was revealed that he had exchanged texts with another FBI agent criticizing the president, the California Republican insisted his previously unreleased private messages were a “damning” development.

“If this was in a court of law, they would throw this case out. I think the Mueller investigation has got to stop,” McCarthy said. “This is the inside of the FBI, the highest levels, and those in charge of an investigation that should end after the millions of dollars they have already spent.”

Giuliani warned on Friday during his own appearance on “Fox & Friends” of the “making of a conspiracy.”

“The reality is that that kind of disdain shows their incredible liberal, elite bias. Their Democratic elite bias. That spills over to Mueller’s people,” he said.

The former New York mayor added to the pressure on Mueller by saying Trump should now definitely not sit down for an interview with Mueller and that his investigation should be suspended. “There should not be an investigation,” Giuliani said. “Mueller should now make a report, everything he has got. No interview of the president. He shouldn’t be bothered with it. Why would he get interviewed in a corrupt investigation?”

In a different Friday interview, Giuliani told The Hill that the Mueller probe shouldn’t just be shuttered — it also should be examined itself for evidence of bias.

“How about we investigate the investigators?” Giuliani said.

Giuliani tried to tamp down the notion that Trump was on the verge of firing either Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has oversight of the special counsel probe because of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal.

Instead, Giuliani said the president’s legal team is poised to try to knock the special counsel out of commission by fighting any moves Mueller makes to force a Trump interview via subpoena. “I would suggest that we challenge the basis of this investigation in court if they ever try to subpoena him for anything,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani’s suggestion that the Mueller probe should be suspended represents a key turning point for the Trump lawyer, who had previously told reporters that the special counsel’s job wasn’t in jeopardy.

The notion that Trump could engage with his Justice Department and order Mueller’s ouster — a move that would be quickly likened to President Richard M. Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” — would likely spark perhaps the biggest political clash of Trump’s presidency.

Trump has long been warned against firing Mueller by senior Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in mid-April that a possible Trump firing of either Mueller or Rosenstein would likely lead to calls for the president’s impeachment. Likewise, South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, an occasional Trump ally, said last summer and again this March that Mueller’s firing — if it came without cause — “would be the beginning of the end of his presidency.”

Trump’s advisers have been saying in recent weeks that his more aggressive style against the special counsel is a clear political move designed to motivate his own conservative base headed into the 2018 midterm elections.

The attacks stem from a conclusion made by the president’s lawyers that Mueller is likely to follow long-standing DOJ legal guidance that a sitting president can’t be indicted while in office and that the main outcome of his investigation, as it relates to Trump, will be a final report that could prompt impeachment proceedings in a Democrat-led Congress.

“If all Mueller can do is write a report, the audience that’s being played to is the House of Representatives as it will exist after November,” said Jon Sale, a former federal prosecutor and longtime Giuliani friend. “By criticizing the prosecution team, it’s posturing. But I think it’s posturing to speak to the House and the future House because that’s where the only possible threat lies.”

But others counter that Trump’s attacks still may not help him legally.

“Trump’s activities are not those of an innocent man,” said former Nixon White House counsel John Dean. “Manafort is in jail because he committed another crime. The IG report has nothing to do with Mueller’s investigation. Rudy has become a meaningless media mouthpiece, and a person who makes noise but who says nothing. The fact that Trump ignores reality reeks [of] his guilt.”