Speaking with reporters on Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump expressed that he is hopeful that former presidential opponent Hillary Clinton will finally be investigated for election fraud.
Shortly before departing for New Jersey, Trump was asked by a reporter, "Will Hillary Clinton finally be investigated for election fraud?"
Trump answered, "I hope so, I hope so. I don't know whether or not that'll happen, but I hope so."
During his brief exchange with reporters outside the White House, Trump also repeatedly criticized Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, whom he recently removed. The president connected his recent decision to fire McEntarfer, whom he accused of falsifying jobs report numbers, to efforts to sway previous elections against him.
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"You have to have honest reports and when you look at those numbers or when you look at just before the election and then after the election, they corrected it by 8 or 900,000 jobs," he said.
"Why should anybody trust numbers? You go back to election day. Look what happened two or three days before with massive, wonderful jobs numbers, trying to get him elected or her elected, trying to get whoever the hell was running because you go back and they came out with numbers that were very favorable to Kamala," he went on. "And then on the 15th of November or thereabouts, they added 8 or 900,000 overstatement reduction right after the election."
Addressing a reporter directly, Trump added, "It didn't work, because, you know who won, John? I won."
Trump's comments regarding Clinton hearken back all the way to his first presidential campaign during which he warned that if he were president he would get his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her behavior. In one of the 2016 debates, Trump famously quipped to Clinton that if he were president: "you'd be in jail."
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As president, however, Trump has not moved to prosecute Clinton, who served as former President Barack Obama's secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
This July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released evidence that she said suggests the Obama administration promoted a "contrived narrative" that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
"There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false," Gabbard said. "They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn't."
"We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI, to investigate the criminal implications of this for the evidence," Gabbard said. "The evidence that we have found, and that we have released, directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact."
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In a July interview, Trump described the Russiagate allegations against Obama and members of his administration as "serious treason."
"What they've done is so bad for this country. And it really started right at the 2016 election," Trump claimed of Gabbard's findings. "And there's a difference when you know it - and when you know it, and it's all written down for you. I mean, it's all there. It's right there. The orders, the memos, the whole thing. It's right there."
