President Trump slammed the “conflicted” special counsel investigating alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia just hours after law enforcement agents allegedly raided the office of his longtime attorney Michael Cohen.
“It’s a disgraceful situation,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
Law enforcement agents reportedly raided Cohen’s office in New York after special counsel Robert Mueller made a referral to the district attorney’s office in the area. The agents seized a wide range of documents related to taxes and Cohen’s involvement in a payment made to an adult film actress in 2016 who alleged an affair with Trump, among other records.
“I’ve wanted to keep it down. I’ve given over a million pages in documents to the special counsel. They continue to just go forward and here we are talking about Syria, we’re talking about a lot of serious things… and I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now,” Trump said. “Actually it’s much more than that. You could say right after I won the nomination it started.”
Cohen signed a nondisclosure agreement in fall 2016 with Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump’s attorney has maintained that he paid Daniels $130,000 out of his own pocket in exchange for her silence about the affair just weeks before the election, while Daniels’ legal team has argued Trump must have known about the agreement and that the absence of his signature on the final contract should nullify the deal.
The president also described Mueller’s team as “the most conflicted group of people I have ever seen.”
Trump has repeatedly attacked Mueller’s office over the number of Democratic donors hired to the team.
While Trump’s legal team has reportedly counseled him against attacking the special counsel’s team directly, Trump described it as the “most biased group of people” in comments to reporters before he met privately with senior military leaders.
Trump, however, blasted the FBI’s search of the offices Cohen uses in New York as a new sign of what he has described as the bureau’s legal vendetta against him.
“When I saw this, when I heard about it, that is a whole new level of unfairness,” Trump said.
“They found no collusion what so ever with Russia,” Trump added.
Returning to a tactic he has deployed frequently in the face of developments in the Russia investigation, Trump lashed out at his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election over her campaign’s ties to Russia.
“These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I have ever seen. Democrats — all. Either Democrats or a couple of Republicans who worked for President Obama,” Trump said of the FBI investigators. “They’re not looking at the other side — Hillary Clinton… all of the crimes that were committed, all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about from the Republican side and the independent side.
