House speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that he’d like Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation to conclude.
“I think he should be free to do his job, but I would like to see it get wrapped up of course,” Ryan told reporters at his weekly press briefing. “We want to see this thing come to its conclusion, but again I’ve always said he should be free to finish his job.”
Ryan’s comments echoed those of Vice President Mike Pence, who said in slightly stronger terms last week that it is time for Mueller to finish up his probe.
“In the interests of the country, I think it’s time to wrap it up,” the vice president said in an NBC interview.
Ryan added that he thinks Mueller is probably preparing to close the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election.
“It’s been a year,” Ryan said. “My guess is he’s probably coming to a conclusion. I can’t speak for that; you’d have to ask them that.”
Mueller’s team, however, has expanded the scope of the investigation and is still pushing to interview the president in person, a move Trump’s legal team opposes, saying investigators only want to trap the president into perjuring himself.
Reports broke this week that the FBI may have had an informant close to the Trump campaign in 2016, sparking outrage from White House and Trump’s legal team.
Trump offered a sarcastic congratulations in a tweet early Thursday morning, on the one-year anniversary of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller as special counsel.
Congratulations America, we are now into the second year of the greatest Witch Hunt in American History…and there is still No Collusion and No Obstruction. The only Collusion was that done by Democrats who were unable to win an Election despite the spending of far more money!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2018
The president’s frustration has mounted as the probe has dragged on past 2017, contrary to what his legal team predicted last year, when they encouraged him to cooperate with investigators.