In a Thursday afternoon radio interview, Donald Trump bemoaned the fact that given his position in the country’s top job, he is not allowed to force the United States Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton, after Trump promised during his 2016 presidential campaign to jail his political opponent, and crowds at his rallies — and at the Republican National Convention — repeatedly chanted “Lock Her Up!”
In the interview with Larry O’Connor, an on-air personality at WMAL Radio in Washington, D.C. , Trump was asked by O’Connor why he had not yet fulfilled his campaign pledge to jail Clinton — a pledge that he appeared to repudiate in his victory speech shortly after the results of the election became clear, in the early hours of November 9, 2016.
“I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign,” Trump said in his first speech after learning that he had unexpectedly won the 2016 election. “Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that sincerely.”
But as evidence of his campaign’s close involvement with the Russian government even as Russian intelligence operatives were tampering with the U.S. election process to sway the election toward Trump has become public — with two of his top advisers including his former campaign manager indicted and another foreign policy aide pleading guilty to lying to the FBI — Trump has lashed out at Clinton.
On Thursday, Trump told O’Connor that the “saddest” part of his job is his inability to order Clinton’s prosecution, according to an account of the WMAL interview published in the Daily Mail online newspaper. Trump added that he would “love” to be directly involved in pressuring the Justice Department to investigate Clinton.
“You know the saddest thing, because I’m the president of the United States I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” Trump said in the interview. “I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing and I’m very frustrated by it.”
In fact, no law or regulation prohibits the White House from taking a hand in guiding operations of the Justice Department, but traditionally, both presidents and U.S. attorneys general have maintained separation, in order to guarantee that the Justice Department and its law enforcement arm, the FBI, operate independently and free of political influence.
“Why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with the dossier, and the kind of money?” Trump said in the interview with O’Connor. “I don’t know, is it possible that they paid $12.4 million for the dossier? And how was it — which is total phony, fake — and how was it used?”
By “the dossier,” Trump was referring to the private intelligence document known as the “Steele Dossier,” after its author, former British intelligence agent turned private investigator Christopher Steele. According to data released by Fusion GPS, the Washington, D.C., political research firm that hired Steele to compile the dossier, the former spy was paid $168,000 for his research and labor in assembling the dossier, which details Trump’s alleged deep financial and personal ties to Russia .
The total cost of compiling and producing the dossier was $1.02 million, according to Fusion GPS , not $12.4 million. The source of Trump’s dollar figure remains unclear.
As recently as late September, when Trump held a campaign rally in Alabama, crowds chanted “lock her up,” directed at Clinton. At the time, Trump told the crowd, “You’ve got to speak to Jeff Sessions about that,” referring to the current U.S. attorney general.
In her recent memoir , What Happened , Clinton admitted that Trump’s threats to jail her caused her deep concern after she failed to win the November 8 election.
“In my head, I heard the vicious ‘Lock her up!’ chants that had echoed through Trump’s rallies,” Clinton wrote. “In our second debate, Trump had said that if he won, he’d send me to prison. Now he had won. I had no idea what to expect.”
[Featured Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
