A triumphant President Trump reveled in his impeachment acquittal victory in a speech from the White House on Feb 6, harshly denouncing the “leakers and liars” he said had targeted him nonstop in a “witch hunt” that “started from the day we came down the elevator” in June 2015.
Trump was referring to the moment he announced himself a candidate for the Republican 2016 nomination. “And it never really stopped,” the president stated. “We’ve been going through this now for over three years. It was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty cops, it was leakers and liars, and this should never, ever happen to another president, ever.”
Comey, Hillary, and Schiff
Trump called out former FBI director James Comey by name as one of the leading figures who tried to take his administration down. “We caught him in the act. Dirty cops. Bad people,” the president said. “If this happened to President Obama, a lot of people would have been in jail for a long time already. Many, many years.”
Trump highlighted the fierce Republican establishment opposition he faced in 2016 and the bitter general election battle he went on to have with Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, which he said is considered “one of the nastiest” in American history. “We thought after the election, it would stop,” the president said, “but it didn’t stop. It just started.”
“So we had a campaign,” Trump continued. “Little did we know we were running against some very, very bad and evil people with fake dossiers, with all of these horrible, dirty cops that took these dossiers and did bad things. They knew all about it. The FISA courts should be ashamed of themselves.”
Despite all of this, the president explained, he still won on Russia and came out ahead in the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation that often dominated the news during the first two years of his administration.
“And by the way,” he backtracked, “Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid for millions of dollars for a fake dossier, and now Christopher Steele admits that it’s a fake because he got sued by rich people,” Trump added. “I should have sued him, too, but when you’re president, people don’t like suing.”
Following his Russia Probe victory, the president said he knew there would be more.
“They made up facts. A corrupt politician named [Rep.] Adam Schiff [D-CA] made up my statement to the Ukrainian president. He brought it out of thin air. Just made it up. They say, he’s a screenwriter, a failed screenwriter. Unfortunately he went into politics after that. Remember he said the statement, which is a mob statement, ‘don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ I didn’t say that. Fortunately for all of us here today and for our country, we had transcripts, we had transcribers, professional transcribers.”
Slamming Romney
Donald Trump (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Trump thanked congressional Republicans for helping him navigate he way safely through the impeachment imbroglio brought on by his telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He praised Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), saying ” this guy is great, and I appreciate it.”
He excoriated unofficial Never Trump leader Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for using religion as a crutch to find him guilty of abuse of power during the impeachment vote. Thanking Romney’s fellow Utah Republican senator Mike Lee (R-UT) for his support, Trump took a further swing at the party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “Say hello to the people of Utah and tell them I’m sorry about Mitt Romney. I’m sorry. Okay?” Trump said.
It must have been a particularly satisfying moment for the president. Having reached the end of the impeachment line with full acquittal, he was able to look back at the Republican, Democrat, and big media foes who have ceaselessly attacked him from a position of renewed strength.
“I’m sure they’ll try to cook up other things,” Trump stated. “Because instead of wanting to heal our country and fix our country, all they want to do — in my opinion, it’s almost like they want to destroy our country. We can’t let it happen.”
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