Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inboxGet our free Inside Washington emailGet our free Inside Washington emailPresident Donald Trump on Friday justified the decision to have his hand-picked prosecutor indict former FBI Director James Comey as a response to the criminal charges once brought against him and to previous investigations into his 2016 presidential campaign.The president told reporters he hopes there will be other sets of charges brought against his various political adversaries because they are “corrupt” and “radical left Democrats.”He went a step further by describing Comey as “worse than a Democrat” and accused him and others as having “weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history.”Pressed further on whether he was concerned that future administrations could use the precedent he set by removing the career prosecutor he’d elevated to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and pushing her loyalist replacement to file charges against his longtime foe, he implied that the move was fair play in response to the multiple indictments he faced during his time out of power.“They did it with me for four years. They went after me. They went after me for four years. And that doesn’t include the four great years that we had in the White House,” Trump said. The president then launched into a litany of grievances about the 2017-2018 Department of Justice probe into alleged ties between his 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government. Both the Justice Department and a separate Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Moscow engaged in a sweeping campaign of interference to help him defeat Hillary Clinton and win his first term nine years ago.After describing the prosecution of Comey as payback for those things, he also claimed that the charges against the veteran former prosecutor as being “about justice” as well as hurting his enemies.“They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it,” he said. More follows…
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Trump reveals why he’s weaponizing DOJ to target enemies like Comey as he heads to Ryder Cup in NY
