President Trump said Friday that the Justice Department’s watchdog report proved the FBI had been biased against him during the 2016 election – citing damning exchanges between two agents and claiming “criminal” behavior by the former top G-man.
Trump told “Fox & Friends” on the North Lawn of the White House that former FBI Director James Comey — whom he fired May 9, 2017 – had done a “terrible thing to the people.”
“Certainly he, they just seem like criminal acts to me. What he did was criminal,” he said. “What he did was so bad in terms of our Constitution, in terms of the well-being of our country. What he did was horrible.”
The president added: “Should he be locked up? Let somebody make a determination,” adding that he thinks “Comey was the ringleader of this whole den of thieves.”
He called the 568-page report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz “a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI.
“Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI,” he added, telling reporters later that the IG’s report “totally exonerated” him.
The report found that Comey was “insubordinate” and deviated from standard FBI procedures but it didn’t exonerate Trump as he claimed.
The president also stepped up his offensive against special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling and whether the president took steps to shut down the probe by firing Comey.
He said that although he “would like to talk” to Mueller, he has reservations about doing so after the release of the long-awaited IG report.
“Here’s the good news: I did nothing wrong. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. The IG report yesterday went a long way to show that, and I think that the Mueller investigation has been totally discredited,” Trump said.
Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani also has suggested that a presidential interview with the special counsel is not in the cards in the aftermath of the IG report.
The president began his day by tweeting about explosive text messages cited in the report.
“FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who headed the Clinton & Russia investigations, texted to his lover Lisa Page, in the IG Report, that ‘we’ll stop’ candidate Trump from becoming President,” Trump wrote.
“Doesn’t get any lower than that!” he added about the August 2016 exchange.
“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok.
“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” responded Strzok, who was overseeing the FBI probe into possible collusion between Team Trump and Moscow.
“If you look at — the head investigator is saying, ‘We have to stop Trump from becoming president.’ Well, Trump became president,” Trump said Friday.
But Horowitz said he found no evidence that the couple’s political views affected their work on the probes into Russian election meddling and Hillary Clinton’s improper use of a private e-mail server in her capacity as secretary of state.
Mueller removed Strzok from the probe after the texts were discovered, while Page has since left the FBI.