President Trump’s conservative allies are going on offense against special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, hoping to blunt any damning revelations that may emerge from the 22…
President Trump’s conservative allies are going on offense against special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, hoping to blunt any damning revelations that may emerge from the 22-months-long investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A senior Justice Department official has told media outlets that Mueller will not recommend new indictments against Trump’s inner circle, which Trump’s defender’s have seized on to argue that the investigation was the “witch hunt” that the president always claimed it to be.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N. C.), the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and staunch Trump ally, took to Twitter immediately to argue the lack of additional indictments would reveal the investigation was a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.
“It would mean we just completed 2 years of investigating ‘Russian collusion’ without ONE collusion related indictment. Not even one. Why? Because there was no collusion,” he tweeted.
Backing up Meadows’s claim that the probe was a waste of taxpayers’ dollars, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) issued a statement Friday afternoon saying that he expects Congress to be fully briefed on the investigation’s cost.
During a follow-up appearance on Fox News Channel, Scalise told host Sean Hannity that the lack of additional indictments “does vindicate President Trump” and “gives credence to those claims that this was a witch hunt.”
“I’d like to see not only the report made public but how many tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent over nearly two years to meander around and, as you say, bully people,” he said.
Scalise also demanded that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, be held accountable for what he called the “smearing” of “good people,” pointing to Schiff’s claim that there was more than circumstantial evidence of collusion with Russia.
Former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos, who was sentenced to 14 days in jail last year for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian intermediaries, tweeted on Friday, “Time to hit back!”
Hannity claimed in his opening monologue that the Mueller investigation was biased from the start because its investigators included 13 registered Democrats and nine of them made contributions to Democratic candidates over the years.
