President Donald Trump is the one responsible for the special counsel investigation, biographer Michael d'Antonio said Sunday during a CNN panel discussion.
CNN host Don Lemon played the footage of Trump's comments on the tarmac in Palm Beach, where he'd been vacationing again.
"It's a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it's a shame that your president has had to go through this for before I even got elected, it began," Trump said, speaking of himself in the third-person.
D'Antonio called the self-victimization "vintage Trump."
"We went through this because he had fired James Comey and told everybody it was because of Russia," he said. "So, you know, this was brought on by the president himself. It was brought on by his denial that there had been Russian interference in the election in the first place. Remember when he said, 'Well, some 400-pound guy on a sofa in New Jersey?' This is all on him; it's not on the Democrats, it's not on Hillary Clinton. This all emerged because Jeff Sessions recognized that he had a conflict, he stepped back from it, and we got the special, and the country went through this nightmare solely because of Donald Trump."
D'Antonio also noted that all Trump could come up with to say after flying back to Washington was that he loved America. After all of this, Trump could have said something about bringing Americans together after this investigation was over, but he didn't.
"Come on, Mike," Lemon said. "He's going to gloat for another five years."
"The certain thing that has happened through all of this is the stress has revealed Donald Trump's character," d'Antonio said. "We may not all agree on the legal issues. We may not understand Barr's memo entirely until we see the Mueller report. But the stress of this, under stress, people's character emerges. And this stress has shown Donald Trump to be the person who he is. He's solely interested in himself. He lies reflexively. He lied today when he said; I am fully exonerated. He's not been. But he's going back to who he is."
Watch the panel discussion below:
