Egged on by a Fox interviewer on Thursday, Donald Trump insisted that his administration is the victim of the worst government conspiracy in U.S. history, a likely preview of his reelection messaging strategy. “This is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country,” said the president, adding that “people should be going to jail for this stuff,” remarks that Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo agreed with. “It is the biggest political scandal we’ve ever seen,” she concurred.
Trump touched on coronavirus at the start of the interview, shifting his prediction last month on the U.S. death toll from below 100,000 to “over 100,000 perhaps,” a fairly safe bet as the U.S. has already surpassed 85,000 deaths. Despite months downplaying the threat and botching his previous predictions, the president still claimed victory. “In all fairness, [100,000 deaths] is at the bottom level of the scale,” he said. “We would have lost 2 million, lost more if we did it a different way.” But even as he discussed this “terrible” and “incredible” loss of life, Trump’s comments largely diverted from the pandemic and instead zeroed in on his “Obamagate” obsession and his short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn’s case.
Earlier this week, Trump struggled to define the exact scope of the supposed scandal despite hammering it ad nauseam. But at its core, the allegations claim Barack Obama conspired with then FBI director James Comey and the bureau’s counterintelligence investigators to sabotage his administration from the get-go, tying it to shady Russian figures and portraying his election victory as aided by a Kremlin interference scheme. “If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago—and I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” said Trump in response to Bartiromo rattling off Joe Biden, John Brennan, and Comey as several Obama administration figures who may have received intelligence reports linked to the Flynn case, per a declassified list provided to Senate Republicans this week. “I’ll tell you, General Flynn and others are heroes, heroes, because what’s happened to them—they weren’t after General Flynn. They wanted him to lie about me…and hopefully a lot of people are going to have to pay.” However, in 2017, Trump was calling Flynn anything but a hero. “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies,” the president tweeted at the time. “It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” Trump went on to tell Bartiromo that “this was all Obama, this was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them.”
Indeed, “Trump and his allies are now telling a very different story” about Flynn’s exit more than three years ago, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Prior to Trump taking office, Flynn had back-channel discussions with a Russian official after the Obama administration had announced sanctions against Russia for 2016 election interference, the FBI discovered when reviewing transcripts of intercepted calls, noted the Times. Flynn, who served a few weeks as Trump’s national security adviser, would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about those discussions, a case that Trump’s Department of Justice now wants dropped. “This case reeks of political influence,” former Brooklyn prosecutor Marshall L. Miller told the Times, suggesting the DOJ is “now trying to rewrite the law to erase the crime.”