Donald Trump blasts Mueller investigation as 'attempted takeover of the government'

President Donald Trump lashed out at Robert Mueller's investigation
AP
David Gardner28 March 2019

Donald Trump has blasted Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his election campaign’s alleged ties with Russia as an “attempted takeover of the government”.

In his first interview since being cleared of collusion by the Mueller report, Mr Trump said: “We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president.”

“This was an attempted takeover of our government, of our country, an illegal takeover,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

“If the Republican Party had done this to the Democrats, if we had done this to President Obama, you’d have 100 people in jail right now and it would be treason. It would be considered treason and they’d be in jail for the rest of their lives.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller
AP

Going on the attack after Attorney General William Barr issued a four-page summary of the 22-month probe on Sunday, the president insisted he would “get to the bottom” of the allegations of Russian interference in his 2016 presidential campaign.

“If you wrote this as a novel, nobody would buy it. It would be a failure, because it would be too unbelievable,” he said. “You had dirty cops, you had people who are bad FBI folks. At the top, they were not clean, to put it mildly.

“We’re getting to the bottom of it. This can never, ever happen to a president again. That was a disgrace and an embarrassment to our country… We’ll have to see how it all started, but I’m going to leave that to other people, including the attorney general and others, to make that determination.”

In the 45-minute telephone interview, the president praised Mr Barr and refused to rule out pardons for aides such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was convicted during the Mueller investigation.

“Many, many people were hurt by this whole scam,” said Mr Trump. “I don’t want to talk about pardons now, but it’s so sad on so many levels.”

Although Mr Mueller found there was no collusion with Moscow, he did not exonerate Mr Trump of obstruction of justice. But Mr Barr’s summary said there was insufficient evidence that the president committed a crime.

Mr Trump called Mr Barr — who is deciding how much of the report to make public — a “great gentleman” and suggested the investigation would not have gone ahead had he been in office earlier in his presidency.

The president also took a dig at the Green New Deal proposed by Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was defeated in a Senate vote on Tuesday. Claiming the deal would cost $100 trillion — “which is more money than you have in the world” — he said: “It’s ridiculous. The new green deal is going nowhere.”

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