For the majority of the first year of Trump’s presidency and into his second year, Donald Trump has been haunted by the looming Mueller investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian government operatives and Trump’s attempts to cover it up. Ever since the investigation began, Trump has repeated the infamous phrase of Richard Nixon about the Watergate scandal that ended his presidency: witch hunt.
In light of the damning information of the past week around his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen’s, inside deals with numerous corporations, consulting firms, and foreign governments for millions of dollars, as well as the release of testimony to the Senate Intel Committee from those involved in the Trump campaign that appear both contradictory to public statements made by those closest the president, his screams of “witch hunt” and “no evidence” look even more ridiculous.
As for today’s whining about the one-year length of the investigation and his previous complaints about the money spent on it, it might do Trump well to remember other investigations and how ridiculous they turned out to be. The Benghazi investigation that was clearly ridiculous from the beginning lasted 17 months and cost more than $7 million only for a Republican-led committee to exonerate Hillary Clinton and determine that no one could have prevented the attack.
The investigation into President Obama’s supposed abuse of the IRS to target conservative groups and withhold their tax-free status lasted more than five years only to find that the same circumstances had kept liberal groups from gaining that status and that it was more about the mismanagement by IRS officials and a backlog of files with not a single piece of wrongdoing by Obama in the case that was touted by the far-right as his “Watergate.”
The investigation into Bill Clinton’s cover-up of a consensual affair with Monica Lewinsky lasted four years. Hillary Clinton’s email server investigation lasted nearly two years and again turned up no evidence that a crime had been committed.
If Trump wants to discuss “witch hunts” with no evidence, he can look no further than his 2016 political rival, Hillary Clinton. Trump used those real witch hunts against her repeatedly during the campaigns.
As for his claims of Obama “spying” on his campaign, the FISA warrant was actually approved to investigate Carter Page, a man who Trump and his administration say never really worked on the campaign and was just an “unpaid volunteer.” His claims seem to contradict that statement.
Twitter was quick to mock Trump’s ridiculous tweets. See some of their responses below:
Featured image via Getty/Pool
