On Wednesday afternoon, at an Oval Office event announcing a $1,000 seed deposit for children's savings accounts, Peter Doocy of Fox News asked the president about something he has been telling rallies for a month: that a Democratic Congress would impeach him. "For what?" Doocy asked. The president said, "They don't know," and then he changed the subject to his predecessors.
“I could’ve done very bad things to Hillary Clinton,” he said. “I could’ve done very, very bad things to Joe Biden.” And then: “I could’ve done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama.” He said he had decided against it because “you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect.” Then he added the second half. “Then I found out that they impeached me twice,” he said, “and I certainly, to this moment, I can do whatever I want, if I want.” He closed with “They’ve done some very bad things.”
The answer contains two claims. The first is about the past: that he held back. The second is about the future: that holding back is a choice he can revisit. He made both in reply to a question about what a Democratic House would do to him after November 3, which makes the second claim the one that matters. The first claim can be checked, and this piece checks it, against the public record of the twenty-one months since he took office the second time.
The sentence he wrote a year ago
The best place to start is a post the president wrote on Saturday, September 20, 2025, on Truth Social. He addressed it to his attorney general, and he appears to have believed he was sending it privately. It complained that nothing was being done, and it named three people: “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???” It said “We can’t delay any longer.” It ended with “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” And in the middle it gave the reason, in a sentence that should sound familiar: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING.”
That is the same grievance he offered on Wednesday, nearly word for word. The difference is what came attached to it. On Wednesday it came with a claim of restraint. In September 2025 it came with names and a deadline, and here is what followed.
The day before the post, Erik Siebert, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was out, after he expressed reluctance to charge James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. On September 22, two days after the post, Lindsey Halligan was sworn in to replace him. Halligan was a former personal lawyer to the president and had no prior experience as a prosecutor. On September 25, three days after she took office and five days before the statute of limitations would have expired, a grand jury indicted Comey on two counts, false statements and obstruction, tied to his 2020 Senate testimony. It declined a third count. On October 9, the same office indicted Letitia James on bank fraud and false statements over a mortgage on a house in Norfolk. Prosecutors in that office had reportedly found the evidence against her insufficient a few weeks earlier.
The third name on the list, Adam Schiff, was under a federal mortgage-fraud investigation in Maryland. By late October that probe had, in the words of one official, “came to a standstill,” because prosecutors had not found enough to charge him. The U.S. attorney there was reportedly told to go find more.
So the record of the post is this: the president named three people in public, and within nineteen days a prosecutor he installed had indicted two of them. The third survived because career prosecutors in another state could not build a case. That is what the president did the last time he said “they impeached me twice,” and it is the baseline against which Wednesday’s claim of restraint should be measured.