WASHINGTON — President Trump on Saturday unleashed an extended assault on the FBI and the special counsel’s investigation, knitting together a comprehensive alternative story in which he had been framed by disgraced “losers” at the bureau’s highest levels.
In a two-hour span starting at 7 a.m., the president made a series of false claims on Twitter about his adversaries and the events surrounding the inquiry. He was responding to a report in The New York Times that, after he fired James Comey as FBI director in 2017, the bureau began investigating whether the president had acted on behalf of Russia.
In his tweets, the president accused Hillary Clinton of breaking the law by lying to the FBI. He claimed that Comey was corrupt and best friends with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He said Mueller was employing a team of Democrats — another misleading assertion — bent on taking him down.
Individually, the president’s claims were familiar. But as the special counsel’s inquiry edges ever closer to him, Democrats vow a blizzard of investigations of their own, and the government shutdown reaches record lengths, Trump compiled all the threads of the conspiracy theory he has pushed for many months in an effort to undermine the investigation.
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Later Saturday, he supplemented a day’s worth of tweets by telephoning in to Fox News Channel’s ‘‘Justice with Judge Jeanine’’ Pirro from the White House to continue his public relations blitz for a border wall. Pirro pressed Trump on why he had yet to declare a national emergency. He said he’s giving Congress a chance to ‘‘act responsibly.’’
Trump also said he has ‘‘no idea’’ whether he can get a deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who opposes spending money on an ‘‘ineffective, wasteful wall.’’
Trump, in his tweets, accused the FBI of opening “with no proof” an investigation in 2017 into whether he had been working against US interests on behalf of Russia, painting his own actions toward Russia as actually “FAR tougher” than those of his predecessors.
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The Times article, published Friday, reported that law enforcement officials became so alarmed by Trump’s behavior around his firing of Comey that they took the explosive step of opening a counterintelligence investigation against him.
Naming several of the bureau’s now-departed top officials, including Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, Trump said the FBI had “tried to do a number on your President,” accusing the “losers” of essentially fabricating a case. “Part of the Witch Hunt,” he wrote — referring dismissively to the investigation now being overseen by Mueller.
At the time he was fired in May 2017, Comey had been leading the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, and the officials believed his removal, in hindering the inquiry, posed a possible threat to national security. Their decision to open the case was informed, in part, by two instances in which Trump tied the firing to the Russia investigation.
The inquiry they opened had two aspects, including the counterintelligence element and a criminal element that has long been publicly known: whether the firing constituted obstruction of justice.
When Mueller was appointed days later, he took over the joint inquiry as part of his larger investigation of Russia’s action in 2016 and whether anyone on the Trump campaign conspired with Moscow. It is not clear whether he is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and no public evidence has emerged that Trump himself secretly conspired with the Russian government or took directions from it.
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Trump indicated Saturday that he had not known of the counterintelligence investigation before the Times article, and he did not dispute the newspaper’s reporting.
But he made clear that he viewed any such inquiry as illegitimate from the start. He presented it, without evidence, as part of a vast, yearslong conspiracy to undo his presidency.
Trump’s tweets defended his decision to fire Comey — “a total sleaze!” — at length, accusing the former director of overseeing a “rigged & botched” investigation of Clinton, and leading the agency into “complete turmoil.” Democrats and Republicans alike wanted Comey removed, he said. “My firing of James Comey was a great day for America,” Trump wrote. “He was a Crooked Cop.”