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Trump calls Justice Department report 'total disaster' for fired FBI director

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump said Friday that a new internal Justice Department report proved there had been FBI bias against him before the 2016 presidential election, citing "vicious" texts between investigators and findings that he said illustrated "criminal" behavior by the bureau's former director.

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By
EILEEN SULLIVAN
, New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that a new internal Justice Department report proved there had been FBI bias against him before the 2016 presidential election, citing “vicious” texts between investigators and findings that he said illustrated “criminal” behavior by the bureau’s former director.

In a wide-ranging interview Friday morning with “Fox and Friends,” Trump said that he did not want to get involved in Justice Department matters but that what former FBI Director James Comey had done “was a terrible thing to the people.”

“I would never want to get involved in that,” Trump said when he was asked if Comey should be “locked up.”

“Certainly he, they just seem like criminal acts to me. What he did was criminal.” He added: “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.”

Trump continued: “Should he be locked up? Let somebody make a determination.”

The inspector general report, released Thursday, covered the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and was anxiously awaited by Trump. It concluded that Comey was insubordinate and broke with long-standing policy in his handling of the Clinton email investigation. But it found no evidence that Comey showed political bias in his oversight of the investigation. The report made no accusations of criminal wrongdoing.

“If you read the IG report, I’ve been totally exonerated,” Trump said, responding to questions from reporters later Friday morning. The report did not examine or make any conclusions about the continuing special counsel investigation that is looking into Trump’s campaigns ties with Russia.

In his first public comments on the report, Trump said in a pair of tweets early Friday that he had done “a great service” for the American people by firing Comey last year.

“The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI,” Trump wrote. “Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI. I did a great service to the people in firing him. Good Instincts. Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!”

The president’s initial stated reasoning for firing the FBI director was that he believed Comey had mishandled the Clinton investigation.

Citing the new report’s findings, Trump praised himself Friday for having “good instincts” at the time.

Earlier this month, the president asked, “When will people start saying, ‘thank you, Mr. President, for firing James Comey?'”

The president has given other justifications for the firing, including that he did it in order to relieve pressure from the FBI’s inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia.

Comey’s firing on May 9 of last year was the first in a series of steps that led to the appointment of an independent special counsel, Robert Mueller. Mueller and his team continue to oversee the investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia’s meddling in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The inquiry, which Trump regularly calls “phony” and a “witch hunt,” has ensnared some of Trump’s former aides and has been a dark cloud over his administration.

Trump also cited communications between FBI agents that were disclosed in the report, saying, “Doesn’t get any lower than that!”

Trump focused on a three-word text message written in August 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was overseeing the bureau’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Strzok’s text was in response to a text from an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.

“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right?” Page asked in a text to Strzok. “Right?!”

Strzok, replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

On Friday, Trump said, “If you look at — the head investigator is saying, ‘We have to stop Trump from becoming president.’ Well, Trump became president.”

The president has been building a public case that the FBI is a deep state conspiracy with the goal of ousting him from the highest office in the country.

Even though the Justice Department report had nothing to do with the special counsel investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties with Russia, one of Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said Thursday that Mueller’s investigation should be suspended. Giuliani also predicted that Strzok would be in jail in the coming days.

Trump said he did not have plans to suspend the Mueller investigation, and he repeated his contention that the inquiry was being conducted by people with conflicts of interest.

“Now, here’s the good news — I did nothing wrong, there was no collusion, there was no obstruction,” Trump said Friday. “The IG report yesterday went a long way to show that. And I think that the Mueller investigation has been totally discredited.”

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