He then said “Some people said I should have done it. Would have been very easy to do it. But I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country.”
Philip Bump responds:
This is nonsense. Trump’s administration did attempt to effect legal retribution against his opponents, including Clinton. It wasn’t that he didn’t try, it was that it wasn’t “very easy” to do.
Trump came into office railing against the intelligence community and the FBI because of the investigation into Russian interference that was publicly reported soon after he won the 2016 election. He fired FBI Director James B. Comey in an explicit effort to kneecap that probe, resulting in the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Mueller ultimately determined that there were links between Trump’s campaign and Russian actors, and that the campaign embraced Russia’s assistance, but that there was no coordination that violated the law.
But from the outset — even before Mueller was appointed — Trump decided this was all a “witch hunt.” He’d wanted Attorney General Jeff Sessions to uproot it, but Sessions recused himself from decisions related to the probe. This was repeatedly frustrating to Trump, who wanted Sessions to reverse his recusal “so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton,” as Sessions told Mueller’s investigators.
After the 2018 election, Sessions was booted and, a few months later, William P. Barr was brought in. Barr had voluntarily written a letter to Trump criticizing the Mueller probe before his appointment; he spent much of the rest of Trump’s term attempting to prove it had been a political hit job.
He tasked U.S. Attorney John Durham — eventually elevated to a special counsel after Trump lost his reelection bid — to suss out the real triggers for the Russia investigation. Durham made no significant progress in this regard, but he did spend a great deal of energy attempting to position Clinton as a central trigger for the probe.
The idea was that the Clinton campaign’s elevation of questions about Trump’s links to Russia (including a quickly discredited rumor involving a Russian bank) was the point of origin for such questions. The reality, as Mueller established and as a report from the Justice Department inspector general reinforced, was that there were numerous links between Trump’s team and Russia and that there was an obvious effort by Russia to upend the election. Durham brought charges against an attorney linked to Clinton. The attorney was acquitted.
Last year, the New York Times’s Charlie Savage explained that the pivot to focusing on Clinton came only after Durham was unable to uncover nefarious intent on the part of the FBI.“By keeping the investigation going,” Savage wrote, “Mr. Barr initially appeased Mr. Trump, who, as Mr. Barr recounted in his memoir, was angry about the lack of charges as the 2020 election neared.”
The evidence wasn’t there — and then they ran out of time.
Bump goes on to lay out all the reasons why there will be much more of this if he’s re-elected. First, he won’t have to worry about re-election. Either he will adhere to the Constitution or he will simply refuse to leave. So there’s that.
He’ll hand pick a bootlicking, MAGA Attorney General who will eagerly do whatever he tells them to do. And he’ll get rid of anyone on the DOJ who stands in the way.
Most importantly, he’ll have the total backing of the official Republican Party and the right wing media. As Bump writes:
The Washington Post on Tuesday detailed how his allies hope to exact revenge against Trump’s prosecutors. The New York Times on Wednesday listed prominent voices calling for a re-inaugurated President Trump to use federal power against his opponents. Many of them use the language Trump presented to Kelly: Look what you made us do. But, again, Trump had already tried to do it — perhaps along multiple avenues.
He will do it. Trump’s philosophy of life is based upon vengeance. It has been since he was a very young man.