By Steve Neavling
Ticklethewire.com
Donald Trump raised the possibility of firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, after the FBI raided the office, home and hotel room of the president’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen.
“I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on,” Trump said during a meeting with military officials Monday. “We’ll see what happens but I think it’s a really sad situation when you look at what happened.”
Trump added, “Many people have said, ‘You should fire him.’”
Democrats and some Republicans said they would vote to impeach Trump if he fired Mueller, who was appointed in May by Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
Trump again slammed Sessions for the decision to recuse himself.
“The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this,” the president said. “He certainly should have let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have put a different attorney general in. So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country.”
It’s unclear how Trump would fire Mueller, who reports directly to Rosenstein. Legal experts said he would have to fire Sessions and replace him with an attorney general who would terminate Mueller.
Trump again dismissed the probe as a “witch hunt” and even “an attack on our country in a true sense.”
“It’s an attack on what we all stand for,” he added.
In a series of tweets Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned Trump against meddling in the probe.
“If [the president] is thinking of using the FBI raid to fire Special Counsel Mueller or otherwise interfere with the chain of command in the Russia probe, we Democrats have one simple message for him: don’t,” Schumer wrote. “Mueller, a Republican, has uncovered a deep & detailed pattern of Russian interference in our elections that led to indictments & guilty pleas. It also led to the Trump admin itself leveling sanctions against Russian individuals, proof that it’s not a so-called ‘witch-hunt.’”
