President Donald Trump, in an interview airing Thursday, laid the blame for the unmasking of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on former Obama officials, and more directly, on former President Barack Obama himself and his vice president, presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden, and said "people should be going to jail" for the "greatest political scam, hoax" in the nation's history.
"This was all Obama. This was all Biden," Trump told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo Wednesday. "These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them."
Trump said he thinks Obama "probably directed them" but even if he didn't, "he knew everything."
"You are going to see that when the papers come out. Remember the Lisa Page text to her lover, saying 'POTUS wants to see everything,'" he said. "[She was] not talking about me. I wasn't president."
On Wednesday, Biden and the former heads of several intelligence agencies were all listed as having made unmasking requests concerning Flynn's calls just before Trump assumed office.
"It was the greatest political crime in the history of our country," Trump told Bartiromo. "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. It is a disgrace what's happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country."
Also, Trump said, "they weren't after Gen. Flynn. They wanted him to lie about me. Make up a story, and with few exceptions, nobody did that."
Trump also accused Biden of lying to ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, when he'd said he knew nothing about the Flynn case.
"This was a terrible, terrible thing that happened to our country," said Trump. "They tried to overthrow a duly elected president of the United States. They tried to do an overthrow with fictional making up stories about Russia. Now it has all come out .... They wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Nobody has been tougher on Russia than I have."
Ex-FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were also named as officials calling for Flynn's name to be unmasked, Trump pointed out, but at the end of the day, "it was impossible for it to happen" without Obama, who "knew everything."
The whole matter, Trump added, is an "international disgrace. All over the world, they talk about it, because this is not America. Hopefully, the people involved are going to pay a big price, because it should never be allowed to happen again."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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