The extraordinary comments this morning from President Trump – even though they have become par for the course from him – remain extraordinary. He castigated the FBI and dismissed the Russia collusion investigation that the FBI is conducting as a “scam.” He made the remarks to reporters he was leaving the White House to … address the FBI at Quantico.
The key sections (transcript via White House):
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI. But we’re going to rebuild the FBI. It will be bigger and better than ever. But it is very sad when you look at those documents. And how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful, and you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it. It’s a very sad thing to watch, I will tell you that.
And I’m going today, on behalf of the FBI, their new building. But when everybody — not me — when everybody — the level of anger at what they’ve been witnessing with respect to the FBI is certainly very sad.
Q Is the special counsel biased?
THE PRESIDENT: You’ll have to make that determination. We’re hoping for a very — let’s put it this way: There is absolutely no collusion. That has been proven. When you look at the committees, whether it’s the Senate or the House, everybody — my worst enemies, they walk out, they say, “There is no collusion but we’ll continue to look.” They’re spending millions and millions of dollars.
There is absolutely no collusion. I didn’t make a phone call to Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia. Everybody knows it. That was a Democrat hoax. It was an excuse for losing the election, and it should have never been this way, where they spent all these millions of dollars.
So now even the Democrats admit there’s no collusion. There is no collusion — that’s it. And we got to get back to running a country.
What we have found, and what they have found after looking at this, really, scam, is they found tremendous — whatever you want to call it; you’re going to have to make up your own determination — but they found tremendous things on the other side. When you look at the Hillary Clinton investigation, it was — I’ve been saying for a long time — that was a rigged system, folks. That was a rigged system.
When you look at what they did with respect to the Hillary Clinton investigation, it was rigged. And there’s never been anything like it in this country that we’ve ever found before. It’s very, very sad. Very, very sad.
He also dismissed a question about when he knew that Mike Flynn, his former national security adviser, was lying about his contacts with Russia.
Again, it’s easy to become inured to this conduct. It’s human nature. But this is not normal.
