President Donald Trump suggested that he has photographs of former FBI director James Comey "kissing" special counsel Robert Mueller.
The president made the bizarre claims during a wide-ranging interview with the conservative Daily Caller website, whose correspondent asked Trump whether Mueller was interfering in the midterm elections by not ending his Russia probe by an artificial Sept. 1 deadline.
"Well, I view it as an illegal investigation," Trump told the website. "It should’ve never been started. It should’ve never been allowed to start. You know, I’m not the target of this investigation, just in case you don’t realize."
"But I view it as being illegal for many reasons," he continued. Some of which are that, No. 1, there was no crime, and No. 2, everybody was conflicted, including Mueller. There were, I mean, tremendous conflicts here. You know the conflicts, you’ve heard the conflicts.”
The correspondent cited one of those alleged conflicts, asking Trump whether he had interviewed Mueller to return as FBI director after he fired Comey in May 2017.
"Sitting right in that chair,” Trump told the correspondent, who was sitting in the Oval Office. “I liked him, but I didn’t give him the job?”
The president claimed he had a previous business dispute with Mueller, but he offered no specifics -- and then claimed to have compromising photographs of the two former FBI directors together.
"I had a real business dispute," Trump said. "And he’s Comey’s best friend, and I could give you 100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other. You know, he’s Comey’s best friend."
Trump then suggested that the special counsel personally dislikes him, and claimed Mueller's team of prosecutors had a partisan vendetta against him.
"How can you possibly have a man who is that, and then somebody from his law firm came out and said, ‘I can’t believe they picked Mueller -- he hates the president, he hates the president,’" Trump said. "So that’s four things, that’s four."
"Then you have the conflicts of the people — you know I call them the 17 angry Democrats, I guess they’re being lowered down now," he continued. "It’s incredible when you look at (Andrew) Weissman and all these people. Some of the people work for the Hillary Clinton Foundation. It’s an incredible thing. Honestly, people are very angry about it. People that love our country are very angry about it. So I consider it to be an illegal investigation. It should’ve never been allowed to have happened.”