President Donald Trump has called the FBI raid on his attorney Michael Cohen’s office a “disgraceful situation.” Agents searched multiple locations Monday while serving warrants obtained by the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as part of an investigation into Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer. You can watch his full statement on the raid above.
Trump spoke to reporters prior to a meeting with military leaders, Vice President Mike Pence and his new national security adviser John Bolton, along with others.
“I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man, and it’s a disgraceful situation, it’s a total witch hunt, I’ve been saying it for a long time, I’ve wanted to keep it down, we’ve given I believe over a million pages of documents to the special counsel,” Trump said. “They continue to just go forward and here we are talking about Syria, we’re talking about a lot of serious things with the greatest fighting force ever and I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now. And actually much more, you could say it was right after I won the nomination it started.”
According to CNN, the raids on Cohen’s office and home are linked to Stormy Daniels. The case was referred to the Southern District of New York by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, Cohen’s attorney, Stephen Ryan, said in a statement. Ryan said FBI agents “seized the privileged communications.” The Manhattan U.S. Attorney behind the Cohen raids is a Trump supporter, Geoffrey S. Berman.
GettyDonald Trump has called the raid on Michael Cohen’s offices a “disgraceful situation.”
Trump called the Mueller investigation, and the Cohen raids, “an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for. So when I saw this, and I heard it, I heard it like you did, I thought, ‘that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness.'”
Trump added, “They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia, the reason they found it, is there was no collusion at all. No collusion.”
About the special counsel’s team, Trump said:
This is the most biased group of people, these people have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen. Democrats all, or just about all, either Democrats or a couple Republicans who worked for President Obama, they’re not looking at the other side. They’re not looking at the Hillary Clinton horrible crimes that she did, they’re not looking at all of the things that happened, that everybody is very angry about. I can tell you from the Republican side and I think even the independent side. They only keep looking at us. So they find no collusion and then they go from there and they say, ‘let’s keep going’ and they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning and I think it’s a disgrace. But this is the most conflicted group of people I’ve ever seen.
Trump also took a shot at Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“The Attorney General made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself. Or he certainly should have let us know if he was going to recuse himself and we would have put a different attorney general in,” Trump said. “So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country, but you’ll figure that out.”
Trump said he has been under attack since he won the nomination.
“It’s a disgrace, I’ve been president now for what seems like a lengthy period of time, we’ve done a fantastic job,” Trump said. “We’ve beaten ISIS, we have just about 100 percent of the caliphate or the land, our economy is incredible, the stock market dropped a lot today as soon as they heard the noise of this nonsense that is going on. It dropped a lot. … That we have to go through that, we’ve had that hanging over us now since the very, very beginning.”
He added, “But the other side, they don’t even bother looking, the other side is where there are crimes and those crimes are obvious. Lies under oath, all over the place. Emails that are knocked out, that are acid-washed and deleted, nobody’s ever seen. 33,000 emails are deleted, after getting a subpoena from Congress and nobody bothers looking at that. And many, many other things. So I just think it’s a disgrace that a thing like this could happen.”
Trump said he doesn’t have any concerns about what the FBI raids could uncover.
Trump also responded to a reporter’s shouted question about why he doesn’t just fire Robert Mueller:
I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens. But I think it’s really a sad situation when you look at what happened. And many people have said ‘you should fire him.’ Again, they found nothing and in finding nothing that’s a big statement if you know the person who is in charge of the investigation — you know all about that – Deputy Rod Rosenstein he wrote the letter very critical of Comey. Well I turned out to do the right thing (firing Comey). If you look at all of the things he’s done and the lies and you look at what’s gone on at the FBI, with the insurance policy and all the things that happened, turned out I did the right thing. But as you know, he also signed the FISA warrant, so Rod Rosenstein, whose in charge of this, signed a FISA warrant and he also signed a letter that was essentially saying to fire James. And he was right about that. He was absolutely right about. So we’ll see what happens. I think it’s disgraceful and so does a lot of other people. This is a pure and simple witch hunt.