President Donald Trump issued Bill Barr an ultimatum during a live phone-in Thursday on Fox Business — either the attorney general indicts Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton for “the greatest political crime in the history of our country” or he will find himself in a “sad situation.”
“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes,” declared the president, “the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re gonna get little satisfaction unless I win. Because I won’t forget it. But these people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama, and that includes Biden; these are people that spied on my campaign, and we have everything.“
The warning comes after Mr Trump left Walter Reed Medical Centre and returned to Twitter with a storm of energetic tweets and retweets, many of them demanding the indictment of Obama administration figures.
“We’ve got so much, Maria, just take a look at the [former FBI Director James] Comey report, 78 pages of kill, done by [DOJ Inspector General Michael] Horowitz,” he added.
The Blaze report: It was not immediately clear if the president was referring to documents and evidence already made publicly available or to information not yet revealed as a part of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation. Durham was tasked by Barr earlier this year with investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe.
What’s the background?
On Tuesday, Trump authorized the declassification of all government documents related to the Trump-Russia investigation and the email scandal involving 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Trump said in a tweet.
That announcement followed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s declassification of a CIA memo addressed to former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok.
The memo informed the two officials about “an exchange … discussing U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Ratcliffe also released notes taken by former CIA Director John Brennan that showed that Brennan was aware of the allegations. Brennan wrote: “Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton [on 28 July] on proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to villify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”