Press secretary says the president’s call for the attorney general to fire special counsel
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s tweets earlier in the day calling the special counsel investigation a “TOTAL HOAX” and urging Attorney General Jeff Sessions to stop the “Rigged Witch Hunt” were just expressions of the president’s opinions and not a directive to his administration.
“It’s not an order, it’s the president’s opinion,” Sanders said several times at the Wednesday afternoon briefing. She insisted Trump was not directly asking Sessions to end the special counsel. Sessions, in fact, has recused himself from any investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s possible role. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, appointed and oversees the special counsel, which is lead by former FBI director Robert Mueller.
“The president is not obstructing,” Sanders said, responding to questions that Trump’s tweets show an intent to interfere in the ongoing investigation. “He’s fighting back.”
Sanders also claimed the White House agrees with Republican senators, including John Thune of South Dakota, who said on Wednesday “I just think they ought to let the Mueller investigation continue on its own course.”
“We certainly think it should be completed. We’d like for it to be completed sooner rather than later,” Sanders said. “The president has allowed this process to play out, but he thinks it’s time for it to come to an end.”
But Sanders also referred to the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt” and repeated Trump’s claim the probe is based off a “dirty, discredited dossier that was paid for by an opposing campaign.” Mueller’s investigation is a continuation of an FBI investigation that began in 2016 and moved forward thanks in part to the feds’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, who were speaking with Russian nationals. Part of the justification for the surveillance warrant on Page was a dossier of embarrassing information, still unverified, about Trump compiled by a former British spy working for a firm hired by the Democratic party.
The Mueller probe has resulted in multiple indictments and guilty pleas, though the Trump campaign associates so far caught up in the investigation have been accused of either lying to investigators or for crimes not directly related to the Russian hacking of Democratic party emails during the election. The most prominent Trump campaign official, former chairman Paul Manafort, began his corruption trial in federal court this week.
In some of his Wednesday tweets, Trump claimed Manafort has been treated unfairly.
