WASHINGTON (AP) — For President Donald Trump, the fight over the “witch hunt” is only just beginning.
Now that special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into Trump’s campaign is over, it’s being transformed into a rallying cry and a weapon for the president’s re-election campaign.
The pall of the two-year probe lifted Sunday, when Attorney General William Barr released a summary of Mueller’s findings that said the wide-ranging investigation found no evidence of collusion by Trump’s 2016 campaign with the Russian government. Barr’s four-page letter was immediately seized upon by the Republican president and his allies as a weapon to use against Democrats, the Deep State and the media.
Even before Mueller’s conclusions were revealed, it was clear that Trump saw the end of the investigation as a political opportunity.
As the president’s lawyers debated legal strategy, Trump aides and political allies developed a plan to turn the end of the probe into the launching pad for a new round of attacks on the president’s foes and a moment to reinvigorate his supporters in the run-up to the 2020 campaign. With pre-written tweets and talking points, Trump surrogates rushed to claim victory and rub the results in the face of Democrats, many of whom had spent months promising that Mueller would turn up more.
“Democrats and their liberal media allies for two years slandered President @realDonaldTrump for ‘conspiring with Russia,'” press secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted. “It was all a malicious, preposterous lie given wall to wall media coverage despite zero evidence. This should never again happen to an American President.”
Breaking a 48-hour stretch of lawyer-imposed silence on Twitter, Trump stood on the tarmac beside Air Force One on Sunday and jubilantly hailed the results, exaggerating the findings as a total exoneration. He also seethed that those behind the probe, which he compared to a failed coup, should be held responsible.
Trump’s campaign moved quickly to raise money off the Mueller news, with a text message to supporters stating, “Dems raised millions off a lie. Now we FIGHT BACK!”
The team’s plans going forward are more expansive, according to seven aides and allies involved with the effort, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private deliberations.
While Trump’s base has long been suspicious of Mueller, the president’s team believes independents and moderate Democrats who backed him in the last election but have since soured may return to the fold if convinced he was unfairly targeted.
Some Republicans who had mused about a primary challenge to Trump if Mueller returned a smoking gun may now stay on the sidelines. Some major talking points for Democrats who had pinned great hopes on Mueller may have vanished. And some swing voters, weary at the prospect of endless investigations and talk of impeachment, may prove more sympathetic to the president.
The president and his allies will now link the report with the investigations launched by House Democrats and try to make the case that, in the wake of Mueller’s findings, further probes are partisan overreach.
“I think they can’t move forward until they apologize,” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told The Associated Press.
He singled out Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and said the congressman’s investigation would have no credibility because he had deemed Trump “treasonous” and promised clear evidence of collusion that didn’t materialize.
“If there are people who contrived this investigation, who made up this collusion, maybe they themselves should be investigated,” Giuliani said.
The president’s allies also intend to use the moment to heighten attacks on the media, which many Trump supporters believe unjustly fanned the flames of the special counsel’s probe in an effort to bring down the president. They aim to highlight specific news organizations and, in some cases, individual reporters and paint them as biased and untrustworthy, according to two presidential confidants.
Eric Trump, the president’s son, took to Twitter moments after Barr’s letter was released to ask for a “simple apology” from the news media “for the hell everyone has been put through for the past two + years,” listing a half-dozen news organizations.
In the days before Mueller submitted his report, Trump told his inner circle that, if the release validated him, he would use Twitter and the power of his office to trumpet the findings, complain about the probe’s cost and depict the entire investigation as an attempt to obstruct his agenda, according to advisers and confidants.
The president’s campaign and pro-Trump outside groups are poised to amplify the message, while his advisers expect Fox News and the conservative media to act as an echo chamber. A full-throated attack on the investigation also will be the centerpiece of Trump campaign events, including rallies, they say.
Trump’s next rally is set for Thursday in Michigan, a state he narrowly won in 2016 and will invest in heavily this time. Count on hearing an earful.
Heck of a job there Mueller, way to drag your own name through manure.
If we are in a recession next year all of this won’t mean anything.
Trump is not clean and the SDNY and NYS Attorney general will have their say.
They always overplay their hand. Always.
Barr is the culprit and that is where the focus should be. He grossly mischaracterized the Report, which is unfavorable to Trump.
No one buries a report that is favorable to him, which exonerates him. No one relies on a hastily written summary in which practically no complete sentences from the actual Report were included.
Trump found the man he needed, hired him as A.D., and then instructed him to provide a rendition of whatever was in the Actual Report to be in a summary highly favorable to Trump. Take the worst prison and there will be a shyster available to turn that prison into Club Med.
This does not dismay me. The Report will come out and Trump and Barr will be in a far worse position than before the Report was written. There are three things which dismay people needlessly.
(1) They are concerned that the Report will not be released to the public
(2) They are concerned that the Report will be favorable to Trump
(3) They are concerned that people’s minds will be made up by Barr’s bogus summary.
W/r/t (1) The Report will be released probably by a leak…
W/r/t (2) See the top of this post
W/r/t (3) We have months before the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. Trump The Blowhard is the best there is at lying and he is the most obnoxious individual in American Political History. People will come around.
This is overplaying the hand. If you track polling in Trump’s first 2 years, his lowest numbers have often coincided with bad #trumprussia news and especially so when combined with another matter (e.g., ACA repeal, Puerto Rico, a bad monthly Econ report, poor foreign policy performance). That movement comes mainly from white folks who might otherwise be persuadable for him. Even many who don’t find Trump abhorrent do not believe he has clean hands on Russia.
Like the Bush years, people were willing to go along with Bush’s war as long as it produced results and didn’t impede life back home. But when those 2 things didn’t materialize, he fell hard. Similarly, Trump lost the House in part because of the Mueller Investigation. People saw a credible investigation exposing corrupt and criminal relationships among his circle and they saw policies like the tax law/ACA repeal/tariffs/general attitude on race that didn’t benefit them. If Trump goes down this rabbit hole, he’ll lose a lot of voters, especially given the inverted yield curve and other signs which point to a slowing economy. Additionally, keeping the report away from Congress proves to Dem voters and Indies that he is in fact guilty. It fuels the fire. That said, it is vitally important to not let Trump get away with this. The report must be released to Congress. Like the government shutdown he has to be forced to abide by the constitutional processes, even if it results in a decision by Congress not to impeach. That’s vitally important for the health of our Democracy and to destroy the myth that Trump is Houdini like or teflon in the political sphere.