Trump slams Mueller ahead of testimony
President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused former special counsel Robert Mueller of committing a crime, without providing evidence, by deleting certain text messages sent between two former FBI officials who had been critical of Trump during his 2016 campaign.
“[Mueller] terminated all the stuff between Strzok and Page,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo, the host of Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” in a wide-ranging phone interview. “He terminated them. They’re gone. And that’s illegal. That’s a crime.”
Peter Strzok, who played a key role in the early stages of the Russia investigation, and fellow agent Lisa Page were romantically involved. Both were removed from the team after their affair surfaced through texts that came to light last year. The president bashed the pair in the interview Wednesday, calling them “stupid lovers.”
Trump’s comments were a roundabout reference to a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general last year that noted the iPhones used by Strzok and Page during their short stints on Mueller’s staff had been reset to factory settings, erasing the messages they contained. Though Trump and his allies have pointed to that fact as evidence of a conspiracy, the inspector general noted that Strzok’s phone was reviewed before it was erased and that the move to wipe the data was a standard practice
“As part of an office records retention procedure, the [special counsel’s] Records Officer stated that she reviewed Strzok’s phone on September 6, 2017,” the inspector general found. “She told the [IG] that she determined it did not contain records that needed to be retained. She noted in her records log about Strzok’s phone: ‘No substantive texts, notes or reminders.’”
Asked about the episode, the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, told the inspector general that “the Department routinely resets mobile devices to factory settings when the device is returned from a user to enable that device to be issued to another user in the future.”
Trump has previously slammed the FBI officials, and has used the exchange between the two as evidence of a scheme to undermine his presidency.
The president continued to dispute the findings of Mueller’s report in the first minutes of Wednesday’s interview, after the news that Mueller will testify publicly before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees on July 17.
In a repeat line of attack against the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump scoffed at Mueller, who he said was “obviously not a Trump fan.” The president also didn’t stray from his stance that there was “no obstruction.”
“It never ends. We had no obstruction, we had no collusion,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo, the host of Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” in a wide-ranging phone interview. “It’s hard to have obstruction when you have no crime. … You didn’t have crime. You had crime on the other side.”
Trump has continued to deride the probe as a “witch hunt,” while Democrats have long accused the president of obstructing justice and thwarting their investigations.
“You had people spying on my campaign, it’s real simple,” Trump added. “It’s so illegal, it’s probably the biggest political scandal in history and they got caught doing it. And it was a reversal of sorts. It’s a horrible thing that happened.”
Mueller’s testimony is expected to shed light on Trump’s efforts to interfere with the Russia investigation and could be a defining moment for Trump, who faces a growing number of Democratic calls for impeachment as the 2020 presidential campaign gains steam.
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
