Trump says ‘there will be others’ prosecuted after Comey
By Betsy Klein, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump told reporters he expects other political opponents to be prosecuted after the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
“It’s not a list, but I think there will be others,” Trump told CNN’s Kevin Liptak on Friday as he departed the White House for the Ryder Cup in New York.
Trump added, “I mean, they’re corrupt. These were corrupt, radical left Democrats. … No, there will be others. That’s my opinion. They weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history. What they’ve done is terrible, I hope, frankly, there are others because you can’t let this happen to a country.”
The Justice Department on Thursday indicted Comey just days after Trump urged it to prosecute him and forced out the prosecutor who resisted charging the president’s political foes. It marked a stunning effort to target and punish his perceived political enemies.
Trump on Friday suggested the case against Comey would be “pretty easy.” Comey has been criminally charged with two felonies, both related to a lie he allegedly told Congress in 2020. During that 2020 testimony, Comey doubled down to the Senate that he had not been authorizing leaks to the press when he was FBI director atop sensitive 2016 investigations. The Justice Department’s indictment said that Comey had “authorized” a contact to serve as an anonymous source in news reports.
“It’s a pretty easy case, because, look, he lied. … That was a very important question that he was asked, and he wanted to be specific, but he didn’t – the only thing that happened to him, he didn’t think he’d get caught. That was a very important answer, and it was very – for him, it was a very good answer if he didn’t get caught, but he got caught lying to Congress,” Trump said.
The president equivocated when asked whether he would consider having a permanent US attorney with more experience prosecute the case against Comey, saying, “We’ll see.”
Acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide appointed by Trump to the post over the weekend, is currently overseeing the case.
When pressed on the precedent the indictment might set and whether he worried Democrats might follow his lead and prosecute his FBI director in the future, he accused Democrats of starting it.
“They went after me for four years,” he said, going on to claim the Comey indictment was aimed at “justice” and “not revenge.”
“It’s about justice really. It’s not revenge. It’s also about the fact that you can’t let this go on. They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it,” he said.
Trump also called Comey “worse than a Democrat.”
Before he was FBI director under President Barack Obama, Comey served as deputy attorney general during the George W. Bush administration.
Earlier in his career, he looked into allegations that former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took part in a fraudulent real estate deal. And many have credited Comey’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s private server days before the 2016 election day as key to helping Trump win.
While Trump said Friday there is not a list of next targets, he hasn’t been shy about the political enemies he’d like to go after — pressuring his attorney general in a social media post last weekend to bring charges against Comey, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
CNN reported on Thursday, before Comey’s indictment, that senior Justice Department leaders have been advocating for a charge against Trump’s former adviser-turned-critic John Bolton this week, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors think they could bring a stronger case by the end of the year against Bolton over the alleged mishandling of national security documents, rather than pushing for a charge at this time.
The administration’s efforts to go after Trump’s political opponents come as they’re also ramping up investigations of unnamed groups they’ve accused of supporting political violence.
In the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he thought Democratic billionaire donor George Soros — one of the right’s favorite targets — was a “likely candidate” for investigation.
“I’m not going to comment on whether there is or is not a pending investigation, but everything’s on the table right now,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters about New York Times reporting about a push at the Justice Department to investigate Soros’ foundation and whether that was part of a memorandum Trump signed.
“I don’t think anybody has to ask,” Trump said. “If you look at Soros, he’s at the top of everything,” he added. “He’s in every story that I read, so I guess he’d be a likely candidate.”
CNN’s Katelyn Polantz and Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional details.
The-CNN-Wire
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