At the top of a meeting with military leaders intended to discuss the U.S. response on the chemical attack in Syria, Donald Trump took time to address the press pool on the raid of Michael Cohen’s office. To say that he wasn’t happy doesn’t do it justice. He treated the investigation as if it were the crime, and he didn’t shy away from drawing a comparison between events in Syria and the raid on Cohen’s office.
“So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, a good man and it's a disgraceful situation. It's a total witch-hunt. I've been saying it for a long time. …
And it's a disgrace, it's a real disgrace. It's 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 when I heard it, I heard it like you did, I said that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness. …
They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia, the reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. No collusion. 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 of Republicans that worked for President Obama.”
Having a search warrant approved at multiple levels is not “breaking in.” Following legal procedure is not “an attack on our country” in any sense.
As reporters were leaving the room, Trump refused to say that he would not fire Mueller.
Why don't I just fire Mueller? Well, I think it's a disgrace, but I think it's 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 in charge of the investigation, you know all about that Deputy Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, he wrote the letter very critical of Comey. … 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. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you.
Trump also took special time out to go after his attorney general. And, of course, Hillary Clinton, as you can see in the video below the fold.
There was the “But her emails” moment ...
“They're not looking at the other side. They're not looking at the Hillary Clinton horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed. 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 well, let's keep going and they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning and I think it's a disgrace. So we'll talk about it more but this is the most conflicted group of people I've ever seen.”
And the Sessions moment:
The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself and we would have used a -- put a different attorney general in. So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country but you'll figure that out.
The repeated use of “disgrace” and characterization of the raid as an attack doesn’t bode well for Trump settling down and allowing the investigation to proceed.
The fact that Trump wasn’t notified until the raid was underway, so that he didn’t have time to tip off Cohen … says something.