The presidential tenure of Donald Trump continues to wreak chaos, confusion and divisiveness.
Trump has renewed his quest for a border wall while former FBI Director James Comey has cast more doubt on the president’s believability.
In the span of just one day, Comey said he fears Trump will lie about just about anything as the heat is turned up on the ongoing Russian investigation and then, the president told supporters at a speech that if Congress did not meet his funding demands for border security, he may support a government shutdown this fall.
Trump spoke Saturday, April 28 in Washington Township, Michigan, at the same time that the White House Correspondents Association dinner was taking place in Washington with some lawmakers and current and former members of his administration in attendance.
During his remarks, he alluded to the appropriations deadline at the end of September.
“We have to have borders, and we have to have them fast,” he said, according to CNN. “And we need security. We need the wall. We’re going to have it all. And again, that wall has started. We got 1.6 billion. We come up again on September 28th, and if we don’t get border security, we’ll have no choice. We’ll close down the country because we need border security.”
Despite his campaign pledge to make Mexico pay for his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump has demanded that Congress fund the project.
In March, he signed a bill that funds the government through September after expressing frustration with a spending package that included $1.6 billion for border security, but not the wall.
In his speech Saturday night, Trump railed against the Democratic Party on a range of issues, including immigration, CNN said.
“A vote for a Democrat in November is a vote for open borders and crime,” Trump said. “The open border policies of the Democratic Party are not just wrong, they’re dangerous and they’re, in fact, deadly. They’re deadly.”
Meanwhile, Comey questioned Trump’s credibility as a potential witness and called a House Intelligence Committee report concluding that president’s campaign didn’t collude with Russia “a political document.”
Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017 after less than four months in the White House, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it might not be wise for Trump to agree to an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation.
“I have serious doubts about his credibility,” Comey said of the president, according to Bloomberg. “Sometimes people who have serious credibility problems can tell the truth when they realize that the consequences of not telling the truth in an interview or in the grand jury would be dire. But you’d have to go in with a healthy sense that he might lie to you.”
Trump has repeatedly called Comey a liar, including in a Friday tweet claiming that he “lied all over the place” and “illegally leaked” classified information. He’s also suggested jailing the former FBI chief.
Comey, who’s making the rounds to publicize his new memoir, also disputed a Friday report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, despite the campaign showing poor judgment in its contacts with the country, Bloomberg reported.
The president seized on the report, tweeting that it shows the investigation is “a big hoax by the Democrats based on payments and lies.”
“That is not my understanding of what the facts were before I left the FBI, and I think the most important piece of work is the one the special counsel’s doing now,” Comey said. “This strikes me as a political document.”
The House panel investigation that led to the report’s publication “wrecked the committee, and it damaged relationships with the FISA Court, the intelligence communities,” Comey said.
“It’s just a wreck,” he said.
