President Trump went on a long and angry tear from the White House Tuesday about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report during an on-camera sitdown with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.
“I think it is ridiculous. We went through two years of the Mueller investigation, [and] it was proven [there] was no collusion, no nothing. So there is no collusion,” the president began, when asked by a reporter about Democratic lawmakers’ efforts to get the full report.
The president then claimed that Attorney General William Barr had ruled that Mueller found no obstruction of justice on his part.
“The attorney general now and the deputy attorney general ruled no obstruction. They said no obstruction. And so there is no collusion, there is no obstruction and now we’ll start this process all over again. I think it is a disgrace,” Trump said.
“These are just Democrats that want to try and demean this country and it shouldn’t be allowed and I’ll totally live by the attorney general,” he said.
Barr in a four-page summary of the nearly 400-page Mueller report said that the special counsel cleared Team Trump of colluding with Russia, but that he had not determined whether the president was guilty of obstruction.
The commander in chief slammed Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, chairmen, respectively, of the House Intelligence and House Judiciary committees, who are continuing probes into a variety of Trump’s affairs.
“We could give them — it is a 400-page report, right? We could give them 800 pages and it wouldn’t be enough. They’ll always come back and say it is not enough,” said Trump, who earlier had said he’d welcome the release of Mueller’s report.
And he told the White House press pool that “you will all get Pulitzer Prizes, OK, Pulitzer Prizes” if they investigated Hillary Clinton’s role in the special counsel’s investigation.
“This is a whole — this was a whole plot. She lost and she lost big. You should have looked at it a long time ago,” he told the press.
“Very bad people started something that should have never been started. And I hope that will continue forward, because people did things that were very, very bad for our country and very, very illegal. And you could even say treasonous,” the president concluded.
Stoltenberg, the former prime minister of Norway, sat quietly during the president’s remarks.
