President
Trump and his campaign organization are going to war against the Russia
investigations, said an official involved in the effort, launching a
multipronged public relations offensive to spread distrust of special
counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Capitol Hill Republicans and
Washington legal professionals say Mr. Trump should keep out of the
investigation and focus on governing because his protestations keep the
story in the media spotlight and make him look defensive.
But the
president is determined to confront head on the allegations of Trump
campaign collusion with Russia and expose the investigation to be a
political hit job. Marshaling opposition from Mr. Trump’s base, the
thinking goes, will make it more difficult for Mr. Mueller’s
investigation to bring down the Trump presidency.
“This
is a war,” said Bruce Levell, a member of the Trump re-election
campaign’s advisory board. “Why would we stop talking to the American
people? That is the best thing you can do: keep talking to your base.
And guess what? The base is growing.”
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Sunday blasted the Russian probe as a “conclusion in search of evidence.”
“They’ve
come up with nothing,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We’ve been doing
this for almost a year now, and what is there to show for it? What has
actually metastasized in a way that we can say, ‘Wow, there’s a smoking
gun’?”
She pointed to Mr. Trump’s rally last week with supporters in West
Virginia, saying the president is making good on his promises to the
voters while the political class obsesses over a “hypothetical.”
“People
just can’t get over that election,” she said. “The president is going
to continue to talk about America, and I suppose others, sadly, will
continue to talk about Russia.”
Fighting Mr. Mueller’s open-ended
probe to the court of public opinion is part of a broader effort to get
more aggressive pushing Mr. Trump’s message on every front, which
includes the president’s consideration of senior adviser Stephen Miller
for the job of communications director after his feisty exchange with
CNN’s Robert Acosta at a White House briefing.
The
Mueller probe into Russian meddling in the election and allegations of
Trump campaign collusion appears to be reaching into Mr. Trump’s vast
business empire and the financial transactions of his associates, a move
the president warned would be crossing a red line.
Mr. Trump also
has eroding support among congressional Republicans, who overwhelmingly
approved new Russian sanctions that took away the president’s ability
to unilaterally lift them. The bill, which the president reluctantly
signed into law, sent a powerful message that he cannot count on support
from Republican lawmakers.
David K. Rehr, a law professor who
teaches strategic Washington leadership at George Mason University’s
Antonin Scalia Law School, said Mr. Trump benefits from keeping his side
of the story in the public eye and forcing the news media to cover his
comments and his rallies.
“It is one of his limited tools to keep
public pressure on what is an open-ended, secretive probe that is likely
to go on for years with little accountability of time spent or tax
dollars being expended,” he said. “His comments keep the partisanship of
the probe in the public eye, with the hopes of undermining its
legitimacy.”
Mr. Trump has some distance to go to build the type
of popular support President Clinton had when he was impeached by the
House but not removed from office in a trial by the Republican-majority
Senate. His acquittal in 1999 was all the more spectacular given the
bitter opposition to his presidency from the Republican Party.
Mr.
Trump remains far from that level of political jeopardy. However, there
are lessons to be learned from Mr. Clinton’s survival instincts.
Mr.
Clinton benefited from the ability to keep his job approval numbers
above 50 percent throughout the scandal over his extramarital affair
with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment over
obstruction of justice and perjury charges.
Mr. Trump’s job approval rating stands at 38 percent in the Real Clear Politics average of recent surveys.
Last
week, Mr. Trump took his case to the American people, telling a massive
campaign-style rally in West Virginia that the Russia investigation was
a Democratic hoax to threaten his election victory.
“They are
trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story
that is demeaning to all of us and most importantly demeaning to our
country and demeaning to our Constitution,” he told a crowd of more
roughly 8,600 people filling an arena in Huntington, West Virginia. “We
didn’t win because of Russia. We won because of you.”
He gave them the cue to reject as laughable allegations of collusion with Russia to interfere in the presidential election.
“Have
you seen any Russians in West Virginia or Ohio or Pennsylvania? Are
there any Russians here tonight? Any Russians?” he said. “They can’t
beat us at the voting booths, so they are trying to cheat you out of the
future and the future that you want.”
Democratic strategist Jim
Manley said Mr. Trump’s rhetoric was “just extraordinarily divisive
stuff” and did his cause more harm than good.
“It may play well
with his base, but that’s it,” he said. “It’s turning off more and more
Americans while at the same time giving Mueller more ammunition to make
his case.”
The next day, Mr. Trump’s surrogates from the campaign were back and hammering home the message.
Lynnette
“Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson, the YouTube star
sisters from North Carolina who became campaign trail sensations
stumping for the Trump campaign last year, delivered the message on “Fox
& Friends.”
Mrs. Hardaway said the president was being railroaded.
“We
know it was no collusion, and it’s a slap in the American people’s
face,” she said. “We got out. We voted for him. We rushed to the polls
and voted for him, and now you want to blame Russia. No. These were the
American people that voted for the president.”
• Valerie Richardson contributed to this report.
