Trump says probe on Russia collusion in US election is ‘illegal’
US President Donald Trump has once again criticized the federal investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the US presidential election, describing the probe headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as 'illegal.”
Trump told Bloomberg News in an interview aired Thursday that Mueller's appointment last year to investigate his 2016 election campaign for possible collusion with Russia was wrong.
“I view it differently. I view it as an illegal investigation” because “great scholars” have said that “there should never have been a special counsel,” he told Bloomberg.
Some legal experts have questioned the US Justice Department's appointment of Mueller, the former FBI director from 2001 to 2013, to handle the probe in the absence of a specific law governing special prosecutors.
But Trump's own Justice Department says it is legal.
The conservative legal group the National Legal and Policy Center argues that Mueller's appointment on May 17, 2017 violated the US Constitution because it was done by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and not by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
In fact, Sessions, who served on Trump's election campaign, had already recused himself from the Russia investigation, leaving Rosenstein empowered to act as the attorney general in the case.
The president has repeatedly criticized Sessions over the Russia probe and resumed the attacks via Twitter last week, saying the attorney general had never fully exerted control over the Justice Department.
Trump said in a Twitter post on Saturday that Sessions “doesn’t understand what is happening underneath his command position.”
Sessions, in a rare rebuttal, responded that he took control of the department the day he became attorney general and would not allow it to be “improperly influenced by political considerations.”
Some Republican lawmakers have predicted Trump would replace Sessions, a former US senator from the state of Alabama, after the November congressional elections.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who is close to Trump and a defender of Sessions, said last week he believed Trump would appoint a new attorney general but should wait until the elections, in which Republicans are seeking to maintain control of both the Senate and House of Representatives.
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