President Trump said Friday that he watched some of FBI official Peter Strzok’s testimony to Congress, and that it shows the official investigation of his campaign’s links to Russia is a “rigged witch hunt.”
“I would call it the rigged witch hunt after watching some of the little clips,” Trump said during a press conference in England with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May.
[Rudy Giuliani: Peter Strzok’s testimony ‘taints the entire’ Mueller investigation]
Trump did not tweet during Strzok’s nearly 10 hours of testimony on Thursday, which was carried live on most cable news channels.
“I didn’t get to watch too much because I’m here, it’s a different time zone to put it mildly,” Trump said. “After watching the people, the man that was testifying yesterday, I call it the rigged witch hunt. I think that really hurts our country and it really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think that we would have a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia.”
Strzok was removed last year from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation after discovery of pro-Hillary Clinton and anti-Trump text messages with then-FBI attorney Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair.
Strzok oversaw the opening of the FBI’s original election-related Russia probe in July 2016, after playing a leading role in the FBI probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server to communicate classified information, softening the wording of a statement then-FBI James Comey used to describe her conduct.
Although he did not tweet during the Strzok hearing, Trump’s Friday remarks echo a Wednesday tweet in which he said: “How can the Rigged Witch Hunt proceed when it was started, influenced, and worked on, for an extended period of time, by former FBI Agent/Lover Peter Strzok? Read his hate filled and totally biased Emails and the answer is clear!”
Strzok argued during his Thursday appearance before the House intelligence and judiciary committees that he had strongly held political views but that they did not influence his work.
