Trump rejects finding that FBI wasn’t biased
President claims investigation by IG ‘exonerates’ him
“The end result was wrong. There was total bias,” Trump said during a live interview on “Fox & Friends” from the White House North Lawn. “It was a pretty good report, and then I say that the IG blew it at the very end with that statement.”
Trump then falsely claimed the report released Thursday “totally exonerates” him.
Yet it has nothing to do with the probe in which Trump is implicated, involving allegations that Russia interfered in the campaign to hurt Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and that Trump associates might have been complicit.
Those allegations, along with suggestions that Trump sought to obstruct justice in the probe, are the subject of the separate, ongoing investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.
The president made a variety of other assertions, a number of them false or misleading, in the Fox interview and then in remarks to other reporters on the White House driveway.
Reporters repeatedly challenged his statements, twice asking the president why he was “lying.”
Trump falsely blamed Democrats for his administration’s border policy of separating children from immigrants in the country illegally, including asylum-seekers; rejected an immigration bill that House Republican leaders had said he supported; distanced himself from once-close associates facing criminal charges; spoke enviously of Kim Jong Un’s grip on his people in North Korea; and again said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin isn’t to blame for Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Asked if he would fire Scott Pruitt, his scandal-tarred director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump praised Pruitt yet declined to rule out a sacking.
“I’m not happy about certain things, I’ll be honest,” he said.
But his main subject was the report on the FBI’s Clinton probe, specifically its passages critical of Comey and agents Trump has considered his nemeses.
The president claimed he would win a poll of FBI rank-and file officers, but he referred to the FBI leadership during the 2016 election as “a den of thieves” as it managed investigations into both campaigns.
He referred to the text messages between agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, in which they expressed angst about Trump’s election and vowed, in one text, to “stop it.”
Strzok’s actions, the president said, were “criminal.”
“I don’t know how Peter Strzok is still working there,” he said.
Mueller removed Strzok from the Russia investigation last year, when their communications first became public, and Page has left the FBI.
Asked if Comey should be “locked up,” Trump demurred, saying he wouldn’t want to “get involved in that.” But he went on to say, contrary to the inspector general’s findings, that Comey committed criminal acts.
“What he did was horrible,” the president said.
Trump said that FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom he nominated to lead the bureau after firing Comey a year ago, is reforming the agency, but he suggested that the perceived bias among some agents would continue.
As he has before, Trump portrayed the Mueller investigation as the work of “13 angry Democrats,” though Mueller is a Republican, as is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee who named Mueller and oversees his team’s work.
Trump, reminded by Fox’s Steve Doocy that he oversees the Justice Department and has the power to make changes, said that he has tried to “stay uninvolved.”
Senior Republicans have warned that Trump’s firing of Mueller or Rosenstein could provoke a crisis, and the threat of impeachment.
The Fox interview was not on Trump’s schedule but the president tweeted on Friday morning that he might wander out to the lawn because a Fox crew was there. Other reporters swarmed as he made his way to the Fox camera, where he engaged in a wide-ranging interview.
As he walked back to the White House, Trump answered questions for 20 more minutes from reporters who circled him.
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