Special counsel Robert Mueller is reviewing President Trump’s tweets as he pursues an investigation into whether the president obstructed justice, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The Times, citing three people briefed on the matter, reported that Mueller is particularly interested in Trump’s tweets about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
{mosads}The president has used the social media platform to fiercely criticize each official.
Mueller’s office declined to comment to the Times.
“If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,” argued Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer representing Trump in the Russia probe, in a statement to the paper.
However, Trump’s lawyers told the Times that they don’t believe Mueller is focused on a particular action for obstruction of justice, but rather is looking at the tweets as part of a larger pattern of behavior.
Trump has tweeted and said in interviews that he would not have nominated Sessions as attorney general if he knew Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
Trump has also given multiple explanations via Twitter for why he chose to fire Comey. Trump cited the Russia investigation in a May 2017 interview with NBC News when explaining why he ousted the FBI head.
In May of this year, however, Trump tweeted that he “never fired James Comey because of Russia!”
Trump has also sent several tweets personally attacking McCabe, who was fired in March for not being forthcoming with investigators during an inspector general review.
After McCabe was fired, Trump suggested the former FBI official should be investigated because of campaign contributions his wife received from an ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton during an unsuccessful campaign in Virginia.
The Times’s report comes three days after Giuliani told Bloomberg News that he suggested to Mueller that Trump would sit for an interview only if Mueller agreed to rule out questions about obstruction of justice and focus on the matter of whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia during the presidential race, which Trump has vehemently denied.
Trump has frequently derided the special counsel’s investigation as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”
More than 20 Russians and four former Trump associates have been implicated in Mueller’s investigation thus far.