WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that a new internal Justice Department report proved there had been FBI bias against him before the 2016 presidential election, citing “vicious” texts between investigators and findings that he said illustrated “criminal” behavior by the bureau’s former director.
In a wide-ranging interview Friday morning with “Fox and Friends,” Trump said that he did not want to get involved in Justice Department matters but that what former FBI Director James Comey had done “was a terrible thing to the people.”
“I would never want to get involved in that,” Trump said. “Certainly he, they just seem like criminal acts to me. What he did was criminal.” He added: “What he did was so bad in terms of our Constitution, in terms of the well-being of our country. What he did was horrible.”
Trump continued: “Should he be locked up? Let somebody make a determination.”
The inspector general report, released Thursday, covered the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and was anxiously awaited by Trump. It concluded that Comey was insubordinate and broke with long-standing policy in his handling of the Clinton email investigation. But it found no evidence that Comey showed political bias in his oversight of the investigation. The report made no accusations of criminal wrongdoing.
In his first public comments on the report, Trump said in a pair of tweets early Friday that he had done “a great service” for the American people by firing Comey last year.
Trump also cited communications between FBI agents that were disclosed in the report, saying, “Doesn’t get any lower than that!”
Trump focused on a three-word text message written in August 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was overseeing the bureau’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Strzok’s text was in response to a text from an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.
“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right?” Page asked in a text to Strzok. “Right?!”
Strzok, replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
On Friday, Trump said, “If you look at — the head investigator is saying, ‘We have to stop Trump from becoming president.’ Well, Trump became president.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.