“Today Show” host Savannah Guthrie asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on March 25 if President Donald Trump should apologize to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The line of questioning came after Mueller submitted his report probing Russia’s influence on the 2016 presidential election to Attorney General William Barr.
Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that the investigation didn’t establish collusion between Trump or any members of his campaign with Russia, a major victory of Trump and a huge blow to his opponents, including most mainstream media outlets that have pushed the Trump collusion theory since before he was elected president.
Guthrie, though, believes that Trump might want to apologize to Mueller. The president repeatedly called the investigation a “witch hunt” and noted that Mueller’s team consisted primarily of registered Democrats, including several people close to Hillary Clinton.
“Does he [President Trump] owe Robert Mueller an apology?” @savannahguthrie asks @PressSec Sarah Sanders pic.twitter.com/LLQIgdaIf0
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) March 25, 2019
“Did Robert Mueller deserve better from the president than this kind of language and behavior?” Guthrie asked Sanders on the ABC program.
“For the last two years, the president has absolutely eviscerated Bob Mueller, a lifelong public servant, a former Marine, a registered Republican. He’s called him a national disgrace, discredited, a prosecutor gone rogue who oversaw a gang of thugs.”
Sanders responded: “Are you kidding? … [Media and Democrats] have called the president an agent of a foreign government,” Sanders added. “That is an accusation equal to treason, which is punishable by death in this country.”
Guthrie responded: “He called Robert Mueller—he trashed him for two years, and, in the end, Mueller just did an investigation that ultimately the president considers a total exoneration of him.”
I’ll say it if others won’t.
Apologies to President Trump.
My latest in @thehill @TheHillOpinion https://t.co/IiaIOlDeYF— Sharyl Attkisson????️♂️ (@SharylAttkisson) March 25, 2019
Sanders said an apology was owed—but not the one Guthrie thought should be offered.
“I think Democrats and the liberal media owe the president and they owe the American people an apology,” she said. “They wasted two years and created a massive disruption and distraction.”
One such apology was offered by longtime journalist Sharyl Attkisson, who wrote in a Hill op-ed on Monday: “We in the media allowed unproven charges and false accusations to dominate the news landscape for more than two years, in a way that was wildly unbalanced and disproportionate to the evidence.”
“We did a poor job of tracking down leaks of false information. We failed to reasonably weigh the motives of anonymous sources and those claiming to have secret, special evidence of Trump’s ‘treason,'” she added. “Apologies to President Trump on behalf of those in the U.S. intelligence community, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, which allowed the weaponization of sensitive, intrusive intelligence tools against innocent citizens such as Carter Page, an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign.”
No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2019
Trump, meanwhile, on March 24 said that the report was a “total exoneration.”
“No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” he said on Twitter late Sunday.
Speaking to reporters, Trump added: “It’s a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it’s a shame that your president had to go through this.”
“It was a complete and total exoneration,” he added. He said it was an “illegal takedown that failed and hopefully somebody is going to be looking at their other side.”
