Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has worked as President Donald Trump's lawyer since April, is calling for special counsel Robert Mueller to be investigated.
In an interview with John Solomon and Buck Sexton of Hill.TV, the pugnacious attorney said that "Mueller should be investigated for destruction of evidence for allowing those text messages from Strzok to be erased, messages that would show the state of mind and tactics of his lead anti-Trump FBI agent at the start of his probe."
Giuliani was referring to the fact former FBI official Peter Strzok and his lover who was also employed by the bureau, Lisa Page, had exchanged a number of text messages hostile to Trump while simultaneously working on an investigation into the president's alleged collusion with Russia. There were thousands of text messages that were not preserved and were thus unavailable to government investigators when they sought to look into the relationship between Strzok and Page, although a story from The Washington Times earlier this month described how Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report attributed that to bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice.
Investigators weren’t able to find any text messages between fired agent Peter Strzok and former bureau lawyer Lisa Page from their time on the Mueller probe because by the time their phones were recovered, they’d been reset for others’ use, an inspector general said Thursday.
The report also said the FBI still isn’t reliably collecting text messages of all of its employees despite the black eye the bureau has suffered from Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page.
"That should be investigated, damn it, that should be investigated fully. You want a special counsel, get one for that," Giuliani proclaimed to The Hill.
Giuliani also spoke to The Hill about whether the president would be willing to answer more questions from Mueller, which the lawyer said he would be unwilling to do.
“I think I announced about ten days ago 'over my dead body' and I’m not dead yet,” Giuliani said. "[President Trump's] not answering any more questions from these people — they are outrageous activity…we did enough."
Although Giuliani has for the most part denounced the investigation and defended the president in his public utterances, he unintentionally let it slip during an interview with The Atlantic earlier this month that he has also found it very difficult to effectively respond to Mueller's questions.
"Answering those questions was a nightmare," Giuliani told The Atlantic. "It took him about three weeks to do what would normally take two days."
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