GOP/JUSTICE DEPARTMENT/ROBERT MUELLER/RUDY GIULIANI/RUSSIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Frustrated and impatient, fed up with waiting and eager to fight back, President Trump has embarked on what amounts to a two-prong strategy to contain the threat and undercut the credibility of the escalating investigations targeting him and his associates. The blizzard of Twitter messages combined with a string of public statements by his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in recent days seemed aimed at turning the focus away from the conduct of the president or his team to that of their pursuers while laying out a series of red lines to limit the reach and duration of the primary inquiry…While he has assailed the investigations for a year, Mr. Trump’s latest assertion of bad faith by the Justice Department and the F.B.I. went beyond talk and resulted in an extraordinary meeting on Monday [5-21-18] at the White House, where the president pressured intelligence and law enforcement officials to allow congressional Republicans to view highly classified information related to the Russia investigation that they had previously refused to divulge.”
-Peter Baker, “Trump Team’s Mueller Strategy: Limit the Investigation and Attack the Investigators,” The New York Times online, May 21, 2018