President Donald Trump called out special counsel Robert Mueller in a series of typo-ridden tweets Wednesday morning, continuing his recent aggressive attacks on the Russia probe.
“‘Special Council is told to find crimes, wether crimes exist or not. I was opposed the the selection of Mueller to be Special Council, I still am opposed to it. I think President Trump was right when he said there never should have been a Special Council appointed because (…) there was no probable cause for believing that there was any crime, collusion or otherwise, or obstruction of justice!’ So stated by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz,” Trump said in a series of tweets.
Trump later deleted and corrected some, though not all, of the typos in his first tweet.
Dershowitz, a lawyer and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, referred CNN to his op-ed published by The Hill Wednesday morning, which had similar though not identical comments to those Trump tweeted.
“I stand by what I wrote in The Hill this morning. Please check and quote it. It lays out my point accurately,” Dershowitz said.
In his Hill op-ed, Dershowitz argues that a special counsel should not have been appointed.
“There was no evidence of any crime committed by the Trump administration. But there was plenty of evidence that Russian operatives had tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and perhaps other elections, in the hope of destabilizing democracy,” he writes.
He continued: “The vice of a special counsel is that he is supposed to find crimes, and if he comes up empty-handed, after spending lots of taxpayer money, then he is deemed a failure. If he can’t charge the designated target — in this case, the President — he must at least charge some of those close to the target, even if it is for crimes unrelated to the special counsel’s core mandate. By indicting these low-hanging fruits, he shows that he is trying.”
Trump has ratcheted up his criticism of Mueller’s investigation in recent days. Last week, Trump tweeted that the Mueller probe “should never have been started and there was no crime.” He has also questioned the political impartiality of the investigation.
