Trump on Rod Rosenstein: ‘My Preference Would Be to Keep Him’

EXCERPT:

TRUMP: "I am talking to him. We've had a good talk. He said he never said it. He said he doesn’t believe it. He says he has a lot of respect for me, and he was very nice. We will see. He’s a member of the Trump Administration, in that sense it's the Justice Department. I would certainly prefer not doing that. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. Unless you call obstruction the fact that I fight back. I do fight back. I really fight back. If you call that obstruction, that’s fine. But there is no obstruction. There is no collusion. I’m going to meet with him tomorrow. I may call Rod tonight or tomorrow and ask for a little bit of a delay to the meeting because I don’t want to do anything that gets in the way of this very important Supreme Court pick. I don’t want it competing and hurting the decision one way or the other. Again, I want to hear what she has to say. But so I may delay that. I don’t want to do anything that’s going to conflict with that. But my preference would be to keep him and to let him finish up. You know I call it a witch hunt and it is a witch hunt. If you look at the FBI statements with Strzok and his lover Lisa Page, if you look at all the things that have gone on in the FBI, if you look at McCabe taking $700,000 from a Hillary Clinton PAC essentially run by Terry McAuliffe and he gives them hundreds of thousands of dollars and he’s in charge of her campaign and his wife is getting all this money to run. She lost. What’s going on? If you look at the horrible statements like 'Way to go, Page. Great story you put into a newspaper. Essentially now we will go and investigate that group,' it’s terrible. We have caught people doing things that are terrible. I would much prefer keeping Rod Rosenstein, much prefer. Many people say I have the right to fire him. He said he did not say it. He said he does not believe that, and nobody in this room through believes that. I deal with the people in this room. I was with Mike Pompeo and we were dealing at a very high level with Japan. I was saying things that nobody in the room even understood and I said them a long time ago and I was right. He said that’s not the 25th Amendment I’m looking at. I can say that for Mike."