Trump slams Mueller as ‘totally conflicted’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday attacked Robert Mueller as “totally conflicted” and “a true never-Trumper” and claimed that the special counsel would have brought charges against him if he had any evidence — a characterization directly at odds with what Mueller said in apublic statement Wednesday.

Trump’s attacks came in morning tweets and later while speaking to reporters at the White House. In one of his tweets, he also seemingly acknowledged for the first time that Russia had helped him get elected in 2016, but he strongly pushed back against that notion while talking to reporters as he prepared to leave Washington.

Mueller ended his role as special counsel on Wednesday and said his office could not consider whether to charge Trump with a crime, because a long-standing Justice Department opinion says a sitting president cannot be indicted. Mueller repeated a line in his report explaining that his team would have exonerated Trump if it could have.

Mueller’s public remarks were his first since concluding a nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether Trump sought to obstruct the probe.

“Robert Mueller should have never been chosen,” Trump said of the special counsel, who was appointed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Republican Trump appointee.

Trump told reporters that he considered Mueller “totally conflicted” because he had discussions about the position of FBI director early in the Trump administration and is friendly with former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017.

“He loves Comey,” Trump said. “Whether it’s love or adeep like, he was conflicted.”

Associates of the two men have said they had a close professional relationship but did not socialize.

Trump caused a kerfuffle earlier in the morning after seeming to acknowledge for the first time that Russia had helped him in 2016.

“Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax,” Trump tweeted. “And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist.”

Shortly afterward, however, he told reporters at the White House that Russia had not helped him get elected.

“You know who got me elected? I got me elected,” he said. “Russia didn’t help me at all. Russia, if anything, I think, helped the other side.”

In his report, Mueller said Russian efforts were aimed at hurting Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In his comments to reporters, Trump played down the prospect of impeachment. A growing number of Democrats were advocating for that course on Wednesday after Mueller’s appearance.

“It’s adirty, filthy disgusting word, and it has nothing to do with me,” Trump said. “There was no high crime, and there was no misdemeanor.”

Speaking at the Justice Department on Wednesday, Mueller said his team found “insufficient evidence” to accuse Trump’s campaign of conspiring with Russia to tilt the 2016 election but emphasized that investigators did not make a similar determination on whether the president obstructed justice.

Mueller said that if his office “had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” And he noted that the Constitution “requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse asitting president of wrongdoing” — a reference to impeachment by Congress.

Because of the Justice Department opinion, Mueller said “charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.”