With his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen meeting with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team this week, and with his son, Donald Trump Jr., speculating that he himself will soon be indicted, President Donald Trump apparently couldn’t contain himself anymore.
“The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess,” he tweeted on Thursday morning. “They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts.” He added, without providing evidence, that Mueller’s team was “screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want,” and called the investigators “thugs,” “a disgrace to our Nation,” and “highly conflicted.”
It isn’t clear what prompted Trump’s early-morning tirade. After all, the outburst was not exactly out of character: Trump has attacked Mueller and the Russia investigation on Twitter nearly 50 times this year alone. But it could be a sign that he received negative news from his legal team or that new indictments against his family or associates are coming down the pike.
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Whereas Trump typically attacks Mueller’s investigation with the same perfunctory language—calling it a “witch hunt” and “rigged”—he was unusually specific in his accusation that Mueller’s investigators were “threatening” people “to come up with the answers they want.” He made a similar charge in August, claiming that Cohen, who is now cooperating with prosecutors in a separate investigation, “made up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’”