For the second time in as many days, Donald Trump called the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller “treason” and indicated that he wants those involved charged with a crime. This follows an earlier tweet from Trump saying, “I think what the Democrats are doing with the Border is TREASONOUS.” The Atlantic suggests that Trump’s claims of treason are exactly how the Founding Fathers feared such accusations could be made, and precisely why the wording regarding what constitutes treason is so precise.
According to a White House pool report, Trump also said that he “absolutely” believes there was spying on his 2016 campaign and that the claim of spying by attorney general was “accurate.”
In the same morning statement, Trump declared, “I know nothing about Wikileaks. It’s not my thing.”
That’s despite talking about WikiLeaks numerous times at rallies, where Trump made statements such as “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!” encouraged his followers to read the site, and relished pulling new documents published at WikiLeaks to drop in his daily speeches. Trump tweeted about WikiLeaks directly 11 times, and used sections of documents obtained from the site in dozens of other tweets. Trump claimed not to know that WikiLeaks follower Julian Assange had been arrested.
Numerous sources have noted that Trump has seemed “increasingly erratic” over the last two weeks as he conducted a purge of the Department of Homeland Security, threatened to close the southern border, and flip-flopped over how Republicans should handle health care going into 2020.
However, while Trump has grown more scattered and inarticulate, he has grown even more forceful on authoritarian ideas such as getting rid of judges, investigating his political opponents, and charging those who investigated his campaign with “treason.”