Are Trump’s Attacks on Mueller Working?

The Russians are also in on the act.

Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

As House Democrats ramp up their investigations into ties between President Donald Trump and Russia, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll has found that a clear majority of Americans support their efforts. About 6 in 10 adults want Democrats to dig into the 2016 Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia, financial ties between Trump and foreign governments, and Trump’s bizarre relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

However, half of respondents said they had “just some” or no confidence that a final report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia would be “fair and even-handed.” Although the survey was conducted in the days just before Mueller charged longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone with lying, obstruction, and witness tampering, that level of skepticism raises questions about whether the attacks on Mueller by Trump and his allies have sowed doubt about whether the special counsel is being a partisan prosecutor, which has no basis in fact.

For two years, the president has sought to discredit the Russia investigations as a “witch hunt”—a phrase he has tweeted more than 160 times over the past two years, according to the Trump Twitter Archive, including twice since Stone’s indictment Friday.

Trump has also specifically gone after Mueller himself: A day after Mueller’s team said that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, had breached a plea agreement and repeatedly lied to them, Trump attacked Mueller as a “conflicted prosecutor gone rogue.”

“The Fake News Media builds Bob Mueller up as a Saint, when in actuality he is the exact opposite,” Trump tweeted in November, arguing that Mueller “is only looking at one side and not the other.”

Meanwhile, in a report published last month, cybersecurity firm New Knowledge found that multiple Russian-directed social-media accounts have long used similar attacks. In 2017, as journalists began to further uncover disinformation spread by the Internet Research Agency—the Russian propaganda operation whose principals Mueller eventually indicted—IRA accounts began targeting the Trump-Russia investigations. “It used derision and disparagement,” New Knowledge researchers concluded, “to create and amplify the narrative that the whole investigation was nonsense, that Comey and Mueller were corrupt, and that the emerging Russia stories were a ‘weird conspiracy’ pushed by ‘liberal crybabies.'”

Partisan suspicions that Trump and the Russians have attempted to sow about Mueller may have had other effects. While most Americans support the ongoing House investigations, 46 percent said they believe Democrats will go “too far” in their efforts to investigate Trump. And Americans have cooled on impeachment, according to the Washington Post-ABC News poll; a majority believes that Democratic lawmakers should continue to hold off on impeachment proceedings, based on what is currently in the public record.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate