President Trump took aim at Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Saturday after the Senate Intelligence Committee member told MSNBC that a sentencing memo filed by federal prosecutors on Friday implicated the president in directing illegal payments to women who claimed they had affairs with him.
In a pair of tweets, Trump mocked Blumenthal for past statements the senator has made referring to his military service, which the president has frequently accused the senator of inflating.
“Watched Da Nang Dick Blumenthal on television spewing facts almost as accurate as his bravery in Vietnam (which he never saw),” Trump wrote Saturday afternoon.
“As the bullets whizzed by Da Nang Dicks head, as he was saving soldiers left and right, he then woke up from his dream screaming that HE LIED,” the president continued. “Next time I go to Vietnam I will ask ‘the Dick’ to travel with me!”
The senator was criticized in his 2010 campaign for comments he made describing his service in the Marine Corps Reserves, which occurred during the Vietnam War era but was based in the U.S.{mosads}
“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Blumenthal said in 2008, according to the New York Times.
The president’s attacks came hours after Blumenthal addressed prosecutors’ latest court filing involving former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
Blumenthal told host Chris Matthews that Cohen’s payments during the campaign to silence Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, two women who claim to have had affairs with the president, amounted to illegal campaign contributions. Prosecutors alleged Friday that Trump directed the payments.
“Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, independent of the special counsel investigation, believe that Donald Trump committed a felony that enabled him or at least helped him to become president,” Blumenthal told Matthews on Friday evening.
“Covering up those payments is part of what was done, part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator,” Blumenthal added.
Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York wrote Friday in court filings that Cohen’s payments to Daniels and McDougal weeks before the 2016 election were made at the direction of Trump, referred to as “individual-1” in the documents.
The filings are some of the clearest evidence yet that federal prosecutors believe the president was involved in illegal campaign contributions in the waning days of the 2016 race.