He then said “Some people said I should have done it. Would have been very easy to do it. But I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country.” Philip Bump responds: This is nonsense. Trump’s administration did attempt to effect legal retribution against his opponents, including Clinton. It wasn’t that he didn’t try, it was that it wasn’t “very easy” to do. Trump came into office railing against the intelligence community and the FBI because of the investigation into Russian interference that was publicly reported soon after he won the 2016 election. He fired FBI Director James B. Comey in an explicit effort to kneecap that probe, resulting in the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Mueller ultimately determined that there were links between Trump’s campaign and Russian actors, and that the campaign embraced Russia’s assistance, but that there was no coordination that violated the law. But from the outset — even before Mueller was appointed — Trump decided this was all a “witch hunt.” He’d wanted Attorney General Jeff Sessions to uproot it, but Sessions recused himself from decisions related to the probe. This was repeatedly frustrating to Trump, who wanted Sessions to reverse his recusal “so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton,” as Sessions told Mueller’s investigators. After the 2018 election, Sessions was booted and, a few months later, William P. Barr was brought in. Barr had voluntarily written a letter to Trump criticizing the Mueller…