During a speech Tuesday night in Palm Beach, Florida, Donald Trump Jr. suggested that there are top officials in the United States government working to undermine the Trump administration, feeding the conspiracy theory pushed by some Trump officials earlier in the year that the “deep state” is working against President Donald Trump.
Trump Jr. did not specifically mention the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, but he referenced text messages sent by a former member of Mueller’s team about his father, suggesting that he believes that investigators on the Russia probe are out to destroy his father.
Trump Jr. brought up the agent’s August 2016 mention of an “insurance policy,” which the Wall Street Journal reported was used to convey that the agent believed the FBI needed to aggressively investigate potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in case Trump won the presidency.
Trump Jr. asked the audience to imagine if an agent in a bureau led by a conservative director had sent something similar about Barack Obama in 2008.
“What do you think would happen? Do you think the media would cover that? Yeah,” Trump Jr. said. “Do you think it would be brushed under the rug like, ‘Oh, thats nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.’ There’d be revolution in the streets. So I’m glad that this is coming out now, because it is good, because real people have to see this.”
He went on to suggest that the text messages suggest that the system is in fact rigged against his father.
“My father talked about a rigged system throughout the campaign, and people went, ‘Oh, what are you talking about?’ But it is,” Trump Jr. said. “There are people at the highest levels of government that don’t want to let America be America.”
Watch a clip of Trump Jr.’s speech via CNN:
Donald Trump Jr.: There are “people at the highest levels of government that don’t want to let America be America” https://t.co/bNpRK9uFLw https://t.co/zr5YeK2uUw
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) December 20, 2017
