The president’s supporters in Congress and the media have been trumpeting the idea of a conspiracy within the FBI

Attacks by Donald Trump on US intelligence agencies were taken up and amplified by the US right at full volume this week, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation moves closer to the president.

The targets of the rightwing ruckus were the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mueller, and anyone else involved in assessing Russia’s assault on US election systems, which intelligence agencies say constitute an ongoing emergency but which Trump has dismissed as exaggerated.

Trump said on Thursday that he was “looking forward” to being interviewed by Mueller about Russia and that the interview could take place within the next “two or three weeks”.

Quick guide What are the allegations in the Trump-Russia investigation? Show Hide What are the most serious allegations? The investigation into Trump and his team appears to encompass allegations of collusion, obstruction of justice, abuse of power and charges specific to Trump aides and former aides. Any case along these lines against the president would be historic. Both of the presidents to face impeachment proceedings in the past century, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, faced obstruction of justice and abuse of power charges. Is there anything we don't know? It's important to note that the work of the special counsel is secret, and the public has no way of knowing for certain what charges prosecutors may be weighing against the Trump team or, in what would be an extraordinary development, against the president himself. What can the special counsel investigate? Mueller is authorized to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump" and related matters. In other words, potential collusion during the 2016 election. But so-called “collusion” is only part of it. The special counsel has the broad authority to build a prosecution wherever the inquiry may lead. The investigation has already resulted in charges against former Trump aides such as tax fraud that do not relate directly to election activity. Anything else? In the course of the investigation, Trump's past business practices have also come under scrutiny. With his first indictments of people in Trump's orbit, the special counsel has demonstrated an appetite for the prosecution of alleged white-collar crimes. The president has denied all wrongdoing. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

Elected Republicans in Congress and even a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice – which houses the FBI – have adopted Trump’s strategy of defaming investigators, bolstering a conspiracy theory broadcast on Fox News this week of a “secret society” inside the FBI bent on destroying the president.

“The grassroots is eating up the notion Trump is a victim of systemic corruption in law enforcement,” wrote Noah Rothman, associate editor of the conservative-leaning policy journal Commentary, on Twitter. “Actively maligning law enforcement and undermining a governmental institution to advance a political narrative,” he added, was “beyond being irresponsible in the extreme.”

But if there are reservations among elected Republicans about the wisdom of trashing US law enforcement on flimsy grounds to help a teetering president shore up his political base and potentially escape prosecution, those reservations are difficult to discern.

Memos

One Republican, the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes, has been asked by Republican colleagues to release a memo drafted by his staff that depicts the Russia investigation as rooted in opposition research funded by Democrats.

Democrats say the memo is tendentious and that they are working on a rebuttal memo of their own.

At the justice department, an assistant attorney general said in a letter sent on Wednesday that for Nunes to release his memo would be “extraordinarily reckless”.

Texts

A second Republican, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, claimed on Fox News on Tuesday to have a corroborating source to support the notion of a “secret society” within the FBI. That explosive idea was sprung from an apparently jokey text message sent between a justice department lawyer and an FBI special agent who was removed last summer by Mueller from the Russia investigation.

The FBI special agent, Peter Strzok, had called the president a “douche” and an “utter idiot” in a separate text leaked to reporters in December 2017. The texts between Page and Strzok have been seized on by Sean Hannity of Fox News and others as “proof” of an anti-Trump conspiracy.

But Johnson was forced to walk back the “secret society” claim the next day, admitting to CNN that he was operating purely on hearsay and saying his true focus was Hillary Clinton’s emails. He later told CNN “it’s a real possibility” the text was written in jest.

Johnson was not alone in his retreat. The morning show Fox & Friends mentioned the term “secret society” more than 20 times on its Tuesday and Wednesday broadcasts, according to tweets by Lis Power of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, but on Thursday there was “not one mention of secret societies on today’s show. Not a correction, not a clarification, nothing.”

That did not prevent Sarah Isgur Flores, a justice department spokeswoman, from feeding the notion more oxygen on Thursday morning in a CNN interview. “The text message about the secret society – as, I think has been reported now,” she said, “has some, it’s unclear, and I think that’s why we wait for an inspector general report.”

‘Treat Mueller like a plague’

Outrunning all his surrogates in the race to discredit investigators, however, was the president himself, who tweeted on Tuesday morning that the justice department’s reported loss of some text messages between Strzok and Page – part of a glitch said to affect thousands of FBI-issued phones – was “one of the biggest stories in a long time”.

But the story seemed to abruptly fold on Thursday with a letter from the justice department inspector general saying that at least some of the “lost” text messages had been recovered, the Hill reported.

The president’s messaging nevertheless fit nicely with a strategy outlined by Trump friend Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, in an interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday.

“He should treat Mueller like a plague,” Ruddy said of Trump. “He should assert executive privilege in every opportunity they can … [the Mueller investigation] is about anything and everything they can find. This is moving rapidly, extremely fast.”