President Donald Trump said Friday that James Comey’s actions prior to his firing were ‘criminal’ and called the agency’s past leadership ‘scum’
‘They just seem like criminal acts to me. What he did was criminal,’ Trump said of the fired FBI chief, during an impromptu half-hour appearance on ‘Fox & Friends.’
‘What he did was a terrible thing to the people,’ the president added of the law enforcement nemesis whom he canned in May 2017.
‘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.’
But ‘should he be locked up?’ Trump asked. ‘Let somebody make a determination.’
He added that he would personally ‘never want to get involved with that.’
President Donald Trump spent a half-hour Friday on ‘Fox & Friends,’ the morning program that has been the most reliably friendly to him, sniping about fired FBI director James Comey
The president was mobbed as he left the West Wing, with reporters staking out the location following a tweet foreshadowing his appearance
Trump also covered immigration, trade, the G7, Russia and his birthday on Thursday during Firday morning’s media extravaganza
Trump said he’s popular among the FBI’s rank-and-file.
‘I mean the real FBI, not the scum on top.’
He told reporters on his way back to the White House that the ‘real FBI’ is on his side.
‘Those guys love me, and I love them,’ he proclaimed.
Comey has become a one-man Trump wrecking crew this year, promoting a book that casts himself as a moral crusader and Trump as a corrupt autocrat.
The release of a Justice Department inspector general report on Thursday – what Trump called ‘a horror show’ – added more fuel to the White House’s return-fire flamethrower.
The report showed Comey presided over an agency where senior officials talked privately about how much they hated Trump and how far they would go to stop him from winning the White House.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in particular were faulted for their biases.
The president’s sudden emergence from the West Wing was closely watched nationwide
Yet despite ample suggestion of a political slant animating people like Strzok, who led investigative teams for both the Clinton email probe and the special counsel’s Russia investigation, the IG concluded that there was no harm, no foul.
Trump wasn’t buying it.
‘The end result was wrong. There was total bias,’ he insisted. ‘The IG blew it at the very end.’
He compared it to Comey’s famous July 5, 2016 press conference in which he listed examples of Clinton mishandling classified information before declaring that she hadn’t committed any crimes.
‘It was almost like Comey,’ the president said Friday. ‘He goes point after point about how guilty Hillary is’ before exonerating her.
And ‘don’t forget,’ Trump cautioned, ‘all of these people like Strzok – what he did was criminal. Strzok and so many others.’
Trump’s Friday morning capped a crazy week that included a Singapore nuclear summit and a contentious G7 trade meeting
The long anticipated inspector general’s bombshell report on the Clinton email investigation pointed fingers of blame at ‘insubordinate’ James Comey but didn’t call hm politically biased
FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page exchanged text messages about keeping Donald Trump from becoming president
Trump foreshadowed his surprise Fox appearance by tweeting a hint before going to the North Law.
‘McCabe is now up, they all work for Comey,’ he said of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. ‘And Comey knew everything that was going on. You think McCabe didn’t tell him everything?’
‘I think Comey was the ringleader of this whole den of thieves. It was a den of thieves,’ Trump said.
The president also hinted that Strzok’s days with a government job could be numbered.
‘I don’t know how Peter Strzok is still working there, to be honest,’ he said, but declared that he intended to remain hands-off about Justice Department personnel matters.
‘I may not stay uninvolved,’ he added, however.
Trump had already lashed out Friday at the FBI director he fired last year – and a pair of romantically involved disgraced Bureau employees – following the release of the damning IG report.
The law enforcement couple, a special agent and a, FBI lawyer, chatted electronically in 2016 about how to stop Trump from winning the White House.
‘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 tweeted.
‘Doesn’t get any lower than that!’
Trump tweeted his disgust about the actions of a few FBI employees earlier on Friday but managed to keep quiet about it all day Thursday while marking his 72nd birthday
‘The IG Report is 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 wrote. ‘I did a great service to the people in firing him.’
Trump also boasted that ‘good instincts’ led him to give Comey his walking papers amid political partisanship in the FBI, and expressed confidenve that his replacement, Christopher Wray, will restore order to the agency.
Thursday’s bombshell report outlined conversations between Strzok and Page that had never before seen the light of day.
In one message on August 8, 2016, Strzok reassured Page that she needn’t worry about Trump winning the White House.
Trump is ‘not ever going to become president, right? Right?!’ Page texted Strzok.
‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,’ he responded.