President Donald J. Trump reportedly said on Friday that he would not be troubled if two former intelligence chiefs, James B. Comey and John O. Brennan, were arrested in connection with their role in advancing the since-discredited narrative that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
In an interview with Reagan Reese, published Saturday, Mr. Trump said the two men had engaged in “a disgrace” against both the presidency and the nation. Asked directly whether he believed arrests might be forthcoming in light of recently declassified documents, Mr. Trump replied, “I don’t know if there’s going to be. There should be.”
“What they did is a disgrace,” he said. “They cheated, they lied, they did so many bad things, evil things that were so bad for the country, and because they did something to me that should have never been done, nobody thought they’d ever do that.”
Mr. Trump accused the former FBI director and former CIA director of having “committed all the crimes,” adding, “We didn’t commit crimes. They committed all the crimes.”
Pressed on whether he would be comfortable seeing the two men arrested live on television, the president did not hesitate. “It would not bother me at all,” he said.
The remarks marked a departure from Mr. Trump’s more restrained approach during his first term, when he at times resisted calls to seek prosecutions of political rivals.
He pointed to Hillary Clinton as an example. “We had Hillary cold. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want the, you know, the wife of a president to go to jail, but she was stone cold guilty of things,” he said.
Mr. Trump said his perspective had shifted during his years out of office, in part because of new disclosures about the origins of the Russia investigation.
In July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents indicating that intelligence officials under President Barack Obama — including Mr. Comey and Mr. Brennan — worked to construct a narrative tying Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign to Russian interference.
“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,” Ms. Gabbard said in July. “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.”
The declassified records, hailed by Mr. Trump and his allies, have fueled demands for accountability among conservatives who see the Russia probe as one of the most serious abuses of government power in recent memory.
The Justice Department in July opened criminal investigations into Mr. Comey and Mr. Brennan, including for possible false statements to Congress.
For Mr. Trump, the investigations represent long-awaited recognition of what he calls years of misconduct by Washington’s most powerful intelligence figures.
“They just went crazy,” he said. “They’re bad people. They’re sick people.”
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