Just before his speech honoring military veterans at a ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France, Donald Trump gave an interview marked by insults directed toward the speaker of the House and former special counsel Robert Mueller.
He also had some thoughts about Queen Elizabeth.
Speaking to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump called the former special counsel a “fool” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a “disaster.”
“Let me tell you, he made such a fool out of himself,” Trump said of Mueller, speaking at a cemetery where more than 9,300 American soldiers who died in World War II are buried.
Mueller is a decorated Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, in which Trump did not serve, and which he described in an interview on British television as a “terrible war” and “very far away.”
The president took issue with Mueller’s public statement on his investigation into Russian election interference. Although Mueller declined to charge Trump with obstruction, he explicitly refused to exonerate the president.
“If we had had confidence that the president had clearly not committed a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said. “Charging the president with a crime is not an option we could consider.”
Mueller’s statement immediately ramped up pressure on congressional Democrats to launch impeachment proceedings. Pelosi, who so far has resisted calls from some members of her party for Trump’s impeachment, did not rule it out.
Trump said Pelosi ignored a subsequent statement from Mueller and the Department of Justice, saying the office “concluded it would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the President committed a crime.”
“Nancy Pelosi, I call her ‘Nervous Nancy,’ Nancy Pelosi doesn’t talk about it,” the president said. “Nancy Pelosi is a disaster, OK? She’s a disaster. And let her do what she wants. You know what? I think they’re in big trouble.”
Pelosi, who was also in Normandy for the D-Day commemoration, declined to respond.
The final question Ingraham asked was about Queen Elizabeth, and whether or not Trump gave her a “fist bump.”
Trump said, “We have a great relationship. We had a really great time. There are those that say that they have never seen the Queen have a better time, a more animated time. We had a period where we were talking solid straight, I didn’t even know who the other people at the table were, I never spoke to them. We just had a great time together.”
(I can pretty much guarantee you that no one told Trump that!)
WATCH:
Trump concludes his interview with Ingraham by claiming "there are those that say they've never seen the Queen have a better time" than the time she just spent with him. (He wasn't joking.) pic.twitter.com/T4eVojyoYo [1]
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 7, 2019 [2]