Photo: The Canadian Press

President Donald Trump waves as he arrives at the White House in Washington, Sunday, Aug. 19, 2018, after spending the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

President Donald Trump on Monday railed against special counsel Robert Mueller in a second day of angry tweets that drew comparisons to Watergate, insisted his general counsel isn't a "RAT" like President Richard Nixon's and accused Mueller's team of "looking for trouble."

"If you FIGHT BACK or say anything bad about the Rigged Witch Hunt, they scream Obstruction!" he tweeted.

Trump's latest rant follows a New York Times report that the White House general counsel, Don McGahn, has been co-operating extensively with the special counsel team investigating Russian election meddling and potential collusion with Trump's Republican campaign.

In a tweet Sunday, he contrasted McGahn with John Dean, the White House counsel for Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Dean ultimately co-operated with prosecutors and helped bring down the Nixon presidency in 1974, though he served a prison term for obstruction of justice.

"The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type 'RAT,'" Trump wrote Sunday, misspelling "counsel."

"But I allowed him and all others to testify - I didn't have to. I have nothing to hide ..." he wrote.

On Monday he called Mueller "disgraced and discredited."

"Anybody needing that much time when they know there is no Russian Collusion is just someone looking for trouble," he wrote. "They are enjoying ruining people's lives and REFUSE to look at the real corruption on the Democrat side - the lies, the firings, the deleted Emails and soooo much more!"

Dean, Nixon's White House counsel and a frequent critic of Trump, tweeted Sunday that he doubts the president has "ANY IDEA what McGahn has told Mueller. Also, Nixon knew I was meeting with prosecutors, b/c I told him. However, he didn't think I would tell them the truth!"

Trump's original legal team had encouraged McGahn and other White House officials to co-operate with Mueller, and McGahn spent hours in interviews.

Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Trump didn't raise executive privilege or attorney-client privilege during those interviews because his team believed — he says now, wrongly — that fully participating would be the fastest way to bring the investigation to a close.

Giuliani also tried to make the case that having Trump sit down for an interview with Mueller's team wouldn't accomplish much because of the he-said-she-said nature of witnesses' recollections.

"It's somebody's version of the truth, not the truth," he said, telling NBC: "Truth isn't truth."