U.S. President Donald Trump continues to remain resolutely opposed to the very existence of the Russia investigation. It’s his associates who carried on with activities like secret meetings with Russian associates, but somehow, in his world, it’s still a “witch hunt” anyway.
This Saturday evening, Trump took to Twitter to blast the investigation yet again, this time given the opportunity for his ranting by the impending public testimony of Peter Strzok before Congress. Strzok is an FBI agent who has been involved in both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia investigation and has attracted significant scrutiny because of having exchanged anti-Trump text messages with a fellow employee at the FBI, Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair.
Incorporating Strzok into his Twitter meltdown, Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday evening:
‘The Rigged Witch Hunt, originally headed by FBI lover boy Peter S (for one year) & now, 13 Angry Democrats, should look into the missing DNC Server, Crooked Hillary’s illegally deleted Emails, the Pakistani Fraudster, Uranium One, Podesta & so much more. It’s a Democrat Con Job!’
Although the inspector general overseeing the Justice Department offered scrutiny of the sentiments that Strzok expressed in his text conversations with Lisa Page, that inspector general’s office did not conclude that there was any evidence Strzok had actually changed the course of an investigation undertaken by the Justice Department due to his political views.
There was a question raised of Strzok’s anti-Trump views having actually made the situation better for the man who is now president, but the agent’s lawyer Aitan Goelman disputes that. The issue is whether or not the emails that eventually prompted the now fired FBI Director James Comey to inform Congress that the Clinton email investigation had been “re-opened” had been pushed to the bottom of the pile, so to speak, thanks to Strzok prioritizing the Trump related Russia investigation.
Goelman blamed “a variety of factors and miscommunication” for the delay in dealing with the emails; that delay ensured that they were a topic of national conversation THAT much closer to the election, which some have pointed to as dragging down Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
What remains clear, though, is that there is no evidence of the course of an investigation involving Trump’s team having gone a certain way because of anyone’s political bias. Trump continues to act as though there is, however.
He repeats the same talking points over and over again, but they’ve been debunked.
There is no “missing DNC server” — the Democratic Party simply didn’t need to submit the actual server hacked into by the Russians to the U.S. government. The Clinton email investigation has long been concluded, a Democratic staffer who turned out to be carrying on with illegal activity isn’t some symbol of a broad conspiracy or broad criminal activity, and there is no “Uranium One” scandal according to the parameters laid out by Trump and Republicans, who claim that Hillary Clinton corruptly sold off U.S. uranium reserves to Russia. It is true that Democrat Tony Podesta cooperated in a corrupt covert lobbying scheme in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that everything else has magically gone away.
Still, Trump keeps at it anyway. His above cited tweet comes after a similar one from a couple of hours prior.
Check out Twitter’s response below.
Featured Image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
