Trump Supports Comey Arrest over Russiagate: ‘Would Not Bother Me At All’
(AP Photo)
President Donald Trump said it “would not bother me at all” to see former FBI Director James Comey and ex-CIA Director John Brennan arrested for pushing claims that the president colluded with Russia in order to win the 2016 election.
Trump made the comment in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese on Friday, which the outlet then published on Saturday.
“I don’t know if there’s going to be. There should be,” Trump told Reese, after she asked if he expected any arrests would be made related to recently declassified Russiagate documents.
“What they did is a disgrace. They cheated, they lied, they did so many bad things, evil things that were so bad for the country, and because they did something to me that should have never been done, nobody thought they’d ever do that,” Trump continued. “Actually, when I left, nobody thought that would happen. They get – they just went crazy. They’re bad people. They’re sick people. They’re the ones that committed all the crimes. We didn’t commit crimes. They committed all the crimes.”
Reese, a moment later, then asked “So James Comey and John Brennan, would you be comfortable seeing them handcuffed and arrested live on TV?”
The president responded it “would not bother me at all.”
President Trump then said he would not have answered that question the same way during his first term. Back in 2017, Trump said he wanted to offer leniency to political opponents like Hillary Clinton – rather than seek criminal investigations — for the good of the nation.
“Hillary’s a good example. We had Hillary cold. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want the, you know, the wife of a president to go to jail, but she was stone cold guilty of things,” Trump said.
His tune has since changed, though, following his four years out of office and after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents in July indicating U.S. intelligence officials like Comey and Brennan worked with Barack Obama’s administration to push the false claim Trump sought Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s help in 2016.
“There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,” Gabbard said in July. “They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”
The Justice Department in July opened criminal investigations into Brennan and Comey, including for giving possible false statements to Congress.
