US political rift magnified after Mueller

Trump: 'False narrative' led to probe; both sides favor release of special counsel's report

The political vitriol gushed forth on Monday, a day after a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's lengthy investigation concluded that US President Donald Trump did not conspire with Russia during his 2016 US presidential campaign.

The Republican president and his allies in Congress went on the offensive after the release of Attorney General William Barr's summary of Mueller's report determined that Trump would face no charges after a nearly two-year inquiry.

"There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, very bad things, I would say, treasonous things against our country," Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday, without naming anyone in particular.

"It was a false narrative," he said. "It was a terrible thing. We can never let this happen to another president again."

US Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, said he would ask Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate the origins of the Russia probe, which was first conducted by the FBI and then by Mueller after the president fired the agency's director, James Comey, in May 2017.

Graham also called for a look at the campaign of Trump's 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the origins of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant for former Trump adviser Carter Page, which was based in part on information in a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who co-founded a private intelligence firm.

Republicans said the FBI failed to disclose that Steele was hired by a firm funded by Democrats to conduct opposition research on Trump.

A debate also is stirring over how much of Mueller's findings should be made public.

"I just asked for the Senate to pass a resolution to make public the full Mueller report," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York tweeted Monday evening. "This same resolution passed the House 420-0. But @SenateMajLdr McConnell (Mitch McConnell) just objected. What are they trying to hide?"

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted: ''I don't want a summary of the Mueller report. I want the whole damn report.''

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said on Sunday that he would call Barr to testify soon ''in light of the very concerning discrepancies and final decision making at the Justice Department".

Democrats, who control the US House of Representatives, demanded a full release, but one of Trump's lawyers, Jay Sekulow, said at least part of the report should be withheld.

Sekulow said it "would be very inappropriate" to release the president's written answers to questions posed by the special counsel, calling the responses confidential.

Trump said on Monday that "it wouldn't bother me at all" if the report were released.

Democrats also showed no signs of letting up on their multiple congressional investigations into Trump's business and personal matters, although the party must decide if it should shift to other issues in its 2020 challenge to Trump, who will have a campaign cudgel in light of the probe's findings.

"Democrats should not focus too much on Mueller," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times. "The flashing yellow light in front of this president is the bond market and the prospect of a recession."

The Kremlin on Monday said President Vladimir Putin was ready to improve ties with the US following the release of Barr's summary and called on the US to formally recognize there was no collusion between Russia and Trump's campaign.

"To some extent, the leader of the United States now has greater room to maneuver, which, in principle, he can use," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the upper house of the Russian Parliament, wrote on Facebook.

The news media, frequent targets of Trump's, also faced a backlash.

"I will have eternal contempt for the TV personalities and Twitter propagandists who egged on this farce, in spite of all the voluminous countervailing evidence, and kept communicating to their credulous viewers and followers that a thorough-going Trump-Russia conspiracy was ever a serious possibility," Michael Tracey wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Daily News on Monday.

The Boston Herald, in calling for an investigation into the origins of the probe, wrote: "Democrats and the media will show little interest in such an investigation but that is of no matter. History will outlive the activists on CNN and it is our responsibility to shed light on the motives behind the machinations to undermine a duly elected president."

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, in an excerpt from his new book, said, "Russiagate is this generation's WMD," in reference to news coverage during the run-up to the Gulf War that contended that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. "The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess," Taibbi wrote.

Much of the media allowed that the findings were a victory for Trump.

"This was about as clear cut as Mike Tyson beating Spinks in the first round," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said, referencing a famous boxing knockout.

"I'm comfortable with our coverage," Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, told The Washington Post. "It is never our job to determine illegality, but to expose the actions of people in power. And that's what we and others have done and will continue to do."

Reuters contributed to this story.