US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that if a foreign power offered dirt on his 2020 opponent, he would be open to accepting it and that he would have no obligation to call in the FBI.
“I think I’d want to hear it,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News, adding, “There’s nothing wrong with listening.”
The role of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, in organizing a 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer offering negative information on then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton was a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the last presidential campaign.
Several of Trump’s Democratic potential opponents for next year’s race, including US senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand, repeated their calls to begin impeachment hearings in the wake of his latest remarks.
Trump’s comments came just a month after he pledged not to use information stolen by foreign adversaries in his re-election campaign, even as he wrongly insisted he had not used such information to his benefit in 2016.
During a question-and-answer session last month with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said he “would certainly agree to” that commitment.
“I don’t need it,” he said as he met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “All I need is the opponents that I’m looking at.”
Trump also insisted erroneously that he “never did use, as you probably know,” such information, adding: “That’s what the Mueller report was all about. They said no collusion.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that Trump Jr should have called his agency to report the offer.
However, President Trump, who nominated Wray to the role in 2017, told ABC News that he disagrees.
“The FBI director is wrong,” the president said. “Life doesn’t work like that.”
Asked whether his advisers should accept information on an opponent from Russia, China or another nation or call the FBI this time, he said, “I think maybe you do both,” expressing openness to reviewing the information.
“I think you might want to listen,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called, from a country — Norway — we have information on your opponent. Oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”
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