Former President Donald Trump on Friday angrily lashed out at the United States Department of Justice for indicting two Russian operatives for allegedly running an illegal foreign influence campaign.

During an appearance outside a courthouse in New York, Trump accused the DOJ of engaging in a conspiracy to undermine his chances in the 2024 election by implicating Russian operatives.

“This is a long and complicated web but it all goes back to the DOJ and Kamala and Sleepy Joe and all the rest of them,” Trump claimed without citing any evidence. “We have a whole rigged election system, nobody’s ever seen anything like what’s happening. Now I understand yesterday they’re bringing up Russia, Russia, Russia again that they’ve done for years.”

Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign engaged in a well-established influence campaign to tip the election to Trump. Although an investigation of the campaign did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russian operatives, it did find that members of Trump’s campaign were aware of and encouraged Russian assistance in getting their candidate elected.

Most infamously, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Russian operative in Trump Tower after they were promised damaging information about […]