US President Donald Trump on Sunday said that he is not considering firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller even as his administration was again forced to grapple with the growing probe into Russian influence that has shadowed the White House for much of his initial year in office.
Trump returned to the White House from the presidential country retreat at Camp David and was asked if he was considering triggering the process to dismiss Mueller, who is investigating whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russian officials during last year’s US presidential election.
“No, I’m not,” Trump said.
However, he did add to the growing US Republican Party criticism of Mueller’s move to gain access to thousands of e-mails sent and received by Trump officials before the start of his administration, yielding attacks from transition lawyers and renewing chatter that Trump might act to end the investigation.
“It’s not looking good. It’s quite sad to see that. My people were very upset about it,” Trump said. “I can’t imagine there’s anything on them, frankly. Because, as we said, there’s no collusion. There’s no collusion whatsoever.”
On Saturday, the general counsel for the transition group sent a letter to two US congressional committees arguing that Mueller’s investigators had improperly obtained thousands of transition records.
The investigators did not directly request the records from Trump’s still-existing transition group, Trump for America, and instead obtained them from the General Services Administration, a separate federal agency that stored the material, according to the group’s general counsel.
A spokesman for Mueller said the records were obtained appropriately.
“When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process,” Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, said.
However, many of Trump’s allies used the e-mail issue as another cudgel with which to bash the probe’s credibility.
Members of the conservative media and some congressional Republicans have begun to systematically question Mueller’s motives and credibility.
The talk of firing Mueller has set off alarm bells among many US Democrats, who warn it could trigger a constitutional crisis.
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