Giuliani Says Mueller Plans to Wrap Up Obstruction Probe by Sept. 1

President Donald Trump‘s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said on Sunday that the obstruction probe will be over by September 1, according to a New York Times report.

Giuliani also stressed that the Special Counsel’s investigation into whether President Trump obstructed the Russia inquiry needed to be completed by then to avoid interfering in the all-important midterm elections.

“You don’t want another repeat of the 2016 election where you get contrary reports at the end and you don’t know how it affected the election,” Giuliani warned, in an effort, the Times noted was “an apparent attempt to publicly pressure Mr. Mueller amid their interview negotiations.”

In his talk with the NYT, Giuliani also framed the obstruction probe as a battle between former FBI Director James Comey and Trump’s credibility.

“We want the concentration of this to be on Comey versus the president’s credibility, and I think we win that and people get that,” Trump’s lawyer opined.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Giuliani’s comments echo Trump’s own tweet from earlier Sunday, where Trump called for the end of the “witch hunt” and warned that letting things go into the midterms would “put some hurt on the Republican party.”

The Special Counsel’s office declined to comment to NYT on the timeline on the obstruction investigation, which as the Times noted, is only one “piece of Mr. Mueller’s broader inquiry, a counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”

Watch more above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]