US President Donald Trump today said the report of the Justice Department's internal watchdog exonerates him of any wrongdoing, even as he described the work of fired FBI director James Comey as "criminal behaviour".
The report, the IG report was a horror show. I thought that one sentence of conclusion was ridiculous. The end result was wrong. There was total bias, Trump said in an interview.
Later talking to reporters on the North Lawns of the White House, Trump said he did the right thing to fire Comey. I think I did the country a tremendous favour by firing him, he said.
A day earlier, in a report the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) slammed Comey and alleged that its investigations have found that there were FBI officials willing to take actions that could have hurt the then candidate Trump.
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. I did a great service to the people in firing him. Good Instincts. Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back! Trump tweeted.
In his interview with Fox and Friends, Trump said Comey was the ringleader of this whole den of thieves."
"If you took a poll at the FBI, (I would win). I mean the real FBI, not the scum on top, said the president.
Trump also alleged that Comey gave a clean chit to Hillary Clinton, his rival in the presidential election.
He totally exonerated her. And if anything you're saying is correct, what she did is they tried to pretend it didn't happen. I would have gone out there, and I would have had the greatest news conference in history. They tried to pretend the exoneration didn't happen, he said.
Now, the exoneration wasn't correct, because there's no way they could have checked that number of e-mails in just a few days. But if you remember, just before the election, he went out and he exonerated her, and they didn't even talk about it. That was the greatest political mistake, Trump said.
Now, with all of that being said, I won Wisconsin, I won Michigan, I won states that, you know, a Republican hasn't won in many, many decades, years. She didn't do a good job, and you never gave me credit for doing a great job. But the fact is, I did a great job, he asserted.
Trump said that he is not thinking about suspending the probe by Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, who is investigating into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 general election.
He asserted that he did nothing wrong. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. The IG report yesterday went a long way to show that, and I think that the Mueller investigation has been totally discredited, he said.
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