Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s newest lawyer, made news over the weekend saying Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election will end on September 1.
Sources familiar with the probe, though, say that’s not true.
The Sept. 1 deadline is “entirely made up” unnamed sources told Reuters. Instead, according to the wire service, they’re “another apparent effort to pressure the special counsel to hasten the end of his work.”
Giuliani has said he doesn’t want a repeat of 2016, when then-FBI director James Comey’s announced his agency was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, during this year’s midterm elections. Similarly, many Democrats have publicly expressed they felt that announcement cost Clinton the presidency.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Giuliani said the entire probe—not just the aspects tied to potential obstruction of justice—would wrap up in September.
Officials speaking with Reuters, though, say there’s no timeline and Mueller’s team will look until it’s satisfied all aspects have been examined.
“He’ll wrap it up when he thinks he’s turned over every rock, and when that is will depend on how cooperative witnesses, persons of interest and maybe even some targets are, if any of those emerge, and on what new evidence he finds, not on some arbitrary, first-of-the-month deadline one of the president’s attorneys cooks up,” the Reuters source said.
Giuliani’s comments come shortly after the Mueller investigation hit the one-year mark on May 17. On the eve of that anniversary, he called for an end to the inquiry, saying “They should [end] it today. As soon as possible.”
That same day, he claimed the Mueller team can’t indict a sitting president, as there was no precedent. Experts doubt the veracity of that statement as well.
