Donald Trump's Witch Hunt Comment Torched By Salem, Massachusetts Politician

One Massachusetts politician had some choice words for President Donald Trump after he called a federal investigation a “witch hunt.” Trump complained Thursday about the Justice Department’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate possible collusion between his campaign and Russia.

“I respect the move,” the president said. “But the entire thing has been a witch hunt. And there is no collusion between, certainly, myself and my campaign — but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians. Zero.”

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Trump also tweeted Thursday that the investigation was “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

To which Seth Moulton, a Democratic representative for Salem, Massachusetts, had quite a retort.

“As the Representative of Salem, MA, I can confirm that this is false,” Moulton tweeted.

Moulton appeared to be directly referring to Salem’s 1692 witch trials in which 20 people were executed after being accused of practicing witchcraft. Considered one of the state’s greatest mistakes, Massachusetts ended up issuing an official apology for the witch trials and declaring the 20 victims innocent.

Moulton’s tweet had garnered more than 141,000 retweets and more than 333,000 likes as of Friday afternoon.

“The Salem witch hunt has always been used exactly the way President Trump used it,” Mary Beth Norton, the author of “In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692,” told the Atlantic Thursday. “The term “witch hunt” has entered a parlance in the United States as a means of discrediting any kind of investigation that people are not happy about or an event of some sort where someone seems to be targeted unfairly.”

Norton noted that the political difference between the actual Salem witch trials and the current investigation were “really quite different.”

“To me what’s interesting about Trump’s tweet is the use of the witch-hunt analogy, because it’s a classic way in which somebody implicitly claims, ‘I am being unfairly targeted,’ because we all believe the people who were accused of witchcraft in 1692 were unfairly targeted,” she said. “It’s not just that it’s a massive attack on him, it’s that it’s an unfair and false attack on him, which goes along with everything else he’s said. That’s what it means to people. It’s not an intrepid investigator finding the truth — it’s someone raising false charges. That’s the implication of the analogy.”

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In addition to his claim about the investigation being a witch hunt, Trump decried the use of a special counsel in a separate tweet Thursday.

“With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel appointed!” Trump tweeted, misspelling counsel before deleting it.

Trump also interrupted a reporter during a press conference Thursday who attempted to ascertain whether he had asked FBI Director James Comey to drop his investigation before firing him.

“No. No,” the president said while the reporter was still talking. “Next question.”