WASHINGTON
— President Trump’s frustration at the investigations into his
campaign’s ties with Russia boiled over on Sunday, as he sought to shift
the focus to a litany of accusations against his 2016 rival, Hillary
Clinton, a day before the special counsel inquiry will reportedly
produce the first indictment in the case.
In
a series of midmorning Twitter posts, Mr. Trump said Republicans were
now pushing back against the Russia allegations by looking into Mrs.
Clinton. But the president, who has often expressed anger that his
allies were not doing more to protect him from the Russia inquiries,
made it clear he believed that Mrs. Clinton should be pursued more
forcefully, writing, “DO SOMETHING!”
He did not specify who should take such action, though critics have accused him of trying to improperly sway the inquiries.
Mr. Trump was apparently referring in his tweets to revelations
last week that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National
Committee had paid for research that was included in a salacious dossier made public in January by BuzzFeed. The dossier contained claims about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia.
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The
president was also reviving unproved allegations that Mrs. Clinton was
part of a quid pro quo in which the Clinton Foundation received
donations in exchange for her support as secretary of state for a
business deal that gave Russia control over a large share of uranium
production in the United States.
And
he was returning to questions about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private
email server and how James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, handled
an investigation into the matter, which was closed with no charges
being filed. Mr. Trump initially cited the email case as a reason for
firing Mr. Comey before conceding that it was because of the Russia
inquiry.
The
president’s Twitter fusillade came as he and his advisers braced for
the first public action by Robert S. Mueller III, the special prosecutor
named after Mr. Comey’s ouster to investigate Russian meddling in the
2016 election. As part of his inquiry, Mr. Mueller is believed to be
examining whether there was collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and
Moscow, and whether the president obstructed justice when he fired Mr.
Comey.
CNN reported
on Friday that a federal grand jury in Washington had approved the
first charges in Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and that plans had been
made for anyone charged to be taken into custody as early as Monday. CNN
said the target of the charges was unclear.
Multiple congressional committees have undertaken their own investigations
into Russian meddling in the elections, following up on the conclusion
of United States intelligence agencies that Moscow sought to sway the
contest in favor of Mr. Trump — an idea that he has frequently dismissed
as a hoax.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press”
on Sunday, Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said the president
had been “too defensive” about Mr. Mueller’s inquiry. “We ought to
instead focus on the outrage that the Russians meddled in our
elections,” said Mr. Portman, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.
The president’s tweets came days after House Republicans announced that they were opening new investigations
into two of Mr. Trump’s most frequently cited grievances: the Obama
Justice Department’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails and the
uranium deal.
Mr. Trump is working to fuel those inquiries. The White House acknowledged
on Friday that the president had urged the Justice Department to lift a
gag order on an informant in a federal investigation into Russia’s
attempts to gain a foothold in the United States’ uranium industry
during the Obama administration.
Critics
called the move improper presidential interference in a federal
criminal inquiry, but Mr. Trump’s advisers said he was merely
encouraging transparency.
In
recent days, Mr. Trump has suggested that he believes that the
questions he has been raising about Mrs. Clinton’s conduct should put to
rest any allegations about his own actions, and end the scrutiny of
Russia’s meddling in the election.
“This
was the Democrats coming up with an excuse for losing an election,” Mr.
Trump told reporters last week. “They lost it by a lot. They didn’t
know what to say, so they made up the whole Russia hoax. Now it’s
turning out that the hoax has turned around, and you look at what’s
happened with Russia, and you look at the uranium deal, and you look at
the fake dossier. So that’s all turned around.”
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation”
on Sunday that while she had seen “lots of evidence that the Russians
were very active in trying to influence the elections,” she had yet to
encounter “any definitive evidence of collusion.”
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