In an interview with The Daily Caller published on Thursday, President Donald Trump attacked “scum” in the FBI, while railing against the “deep state.”
The president was interviewed by Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, and the two touched upon a number of pressing issues, ranging from impeachment to media bias.
Gorka also asked Trump about the war he has supposedly been waging on the so-called deep state. The president responded by suggesting that he has managed to reform the FBI, as well as the Justice Department.
Trump, he said, rid FBI of “scum,” and appointed Attorney General William Barr to improve the DOJ.
“Well, I think, if it all works out, I will consider it one of the greatest things I’ve done,” the president said of his supposed attack on the deep state.
“You look at what’s happened to the absolute scum at the top of the FBI. You look at what’s happening over at the Justice Department, now we have a great attorney general.”
After praising Barr, Trump ripped into Jeff Sessions, Barr’s predecessor, who left his post in 2018.
Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest and most prominent supporters, but he recused himself from overseeing former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, apparently angering the president.
Since then, Trump has publicly criticized his former attorney general on numerous occasions. In the conversation with Gorka, the president described the former Alabama senator as a “disaster.”
“Just a total disaster,” the commander-in-chief said of Sessions.
“He was an embarrassment to the great state of Alabama. And I put him there because he endorsed me, and he wanted it so badly. And I wish he’d never endorsed me,” he said.
“But now we have a great attorney general,” Trump said of Barr, reaffirming that he has taken on the deep state.
“And I think with the destruction of the deep state, certainly I’ve done big damage,” he said.
In 2016, running as an anti-establishment Republican and a political outsider willing to challenge the system, Trump vowed to “drain the swamp” and fight the deep state.
He has done the opposite, a recent analysis by The Associated Press suggests.
Speaking in The Villages, Florida, Trump tempers his usual boasts about the economy by saying the economy “gets a little hurt by politics,” which he blames on Dems pic.twitter.com/aCJEMCMVNf
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 3, 2019
In fact, according to AP , Trump has appointed more lobbyists to his cabinet in four years than former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama did in eight, ensuring that lobbyists regulate and oversee the industries they have ties to.
Similarly, other analyses have suggested, Trump’s 2017 Tax and Jobs Act — the most aggressive corporate tax cut in American history — has not done much for ordinary Americans, helping corporations and billionaires reap record profits.