Complained to aides... Again and again and again.......

Trump complained to aides about no DOJ probe of Clinton, Comey

By ELIANA JOHNSON and GABBY ORR

President Donald Trump repeatedly expressed frustration during his first year in office that the Justice Department was spending more time investigating his political campaign than some of his biggest adversaries, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.

The president shared those views with the White House counsel at the time, Don McGahn, as well as with several other former White House officials, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Those officials include former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former White House staff secretary Rob Porter.

The most frequent prompts for the president’s ire were television segments featuring Sean Hannity and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), three Trump allies who have focused time and energy on Clinton’s misuse of a private email server. In April, for example, Trump promoted on Twitter a Hannity special that focused on “Deep State crime families” bent on destroying the president. The show’s villains included Comey and Clinton.

After watching Hannity and other friends on air, according to a former White House official, Trump would ask aides, “Why is the Justice Department investigating me and why are they wiretapping Carter Page but they aren’t even looking at Hillary Clinton?” Page is a former Trump campaign aide whose communications the FBI was surveilling on suspicion that he was acting as a Russian agent.

The New York Times first reported Tuesday night that the president wanted to demand that the Justice Department prosecute Comey and Clinton.

McGahn drafted a memo warning the president against ordering the department to prosecute any individual, according to one of the two sources. It is unclear whether the president, who rarely reads briefing documents or other preparatory material from his staff, actually read the memo, or whether McGahn created the document as a self-protective measure should the president refuse to heed his advice.

“Mr. McGahn will not comment on his legal advice to the president,” McGahn’s lawyer, Bill Burck, said in a statement shared with POLITICO. “Like any client, the president is entitled to confidentiality. Mr. McGahn would point out, though, that the president never, to his knowledge, ordered that anyone prosecute Hillary Clinton or James Comey.”

McGahn scrupulously documented his interactions with the president. In his book “Fear,” Bob Woodward reported that McGahn “religiously dictated” all of his significant discussions with the president to his chief of staff, Annie Donaldson, and he is likely to have created a written record of his conversations about Justice Department prosecutions that way, as well.

Democrats were quick to seize on the news on Tuesday, using it to bolster their argument that Congress must pass a bill to protect special counsel Robert Mueller, the president’s bête noire. Democrats take control of the House chamber in January, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has signaled that he has no intention of bringing a bipartisan bill that would prevent the president from firing the special counsel to the Senate floor for a vote.

“To those who have said that Trump is committed to the rule of law, and that he would never seek to turn his personal or political animus into criminal prosecution of his opponents: He is not. And he would,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter on Tuesday evening. Schiff, who is poised to become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, continued: “We must pass legislation to protect Mueller before it’s too late.”

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who is set to chair the House Judiciary Committee, echoed those views, writing on Twitter: “We have long watched @realDonaldTrump try to interfere with/undermine DOJ. Now, additionally, we see that he wasn’t just boasting about an absolutely inappropriate aiming of DOJ at his political enemies — real or imagined — he actually started down that road.”

The president’s private comments about Clinton and Comey mirror his public statements about the two ex-officials.

“James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!” he fumed in August 2017.

It has been a constant theme of his Twitter rants. A year later, he wrote: “Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China. Next move better be by the FBI & DOJ or, after all of their other missteps…their credibility will be forever gone!”