Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage reveals ‘biggest mistake’ President Trump made in office

HE’S one of Donald Trump’s most high-profile supporters, but now revealed what the US President got all wrong.

FORMER UKIP leader Nigel Farage said the “biggest mistake” President Donald Trump made in office was sacking FBI Director James Comey as it opened up a new battleground with intelligence agencies and led to the Mueller investigation over his campaign team’s ties with Russia.

The 53-year-old Brexit architect who backed Trump’s 2016 presidential run said he thinks the Republican president is “doing a great job” and will be “re-elected in a landslide” in 2020. However, he conceded Trump’s biggest mistake was to sack the former FBI director in a decision that should have been a case of “better the devil you know rather than taking on the whole world”.

“The biggest mistake was sacking Comey. I know Comey was leaking to the press and I know Comey really wasn’t being very helpful, but you can’t fight everybody at once,” he told reporters in London.

“(Mr) Trump had so many battles going on at that time … to have opened up another front, going against the FBI and everybody else was a mistake. It led to Mueller.”

Donald Trump and Nigel Farage in Trump Tower following Trump’s election.

The European Parliament member said he doesn’t think Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will find any evidence of collusion during the election campaign and rubbished reports he could be a “person of interest” in the FBI investigation given his previous visit to Julian Assange and friendship with Steve Bannon and Mr Trump.

“I am the centre of a global conspiracy. It is me,” he joked. “I have been running memory sticks back and forth between Trump, Assange, Putin, Bannon. I am the great evil. There’s a bit of me wishes it was true. I wish I was that important.”

He also said former White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon made a “very bad mistake” in saying Donald Trump Jr was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” in comments that surfaced in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury and led to the former Breitbart editor being ousted from the White House.

“(Mr) Trump, he is a fiercely loyal man …. Despite divorces and all the rest of it, they do have an amazing family unit. These people stick very, very tight together. These are the people ultimately he trusts most in the world, so Steve making the comments he made led inevitably to what happened,” he said.

Nigel Farage has campaigned for and defended Donald Trump as US President and said he is doing a “great job” in office. Picture: GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Jonathan BACHMAN

The former UKIP leader stepped down from the party following the Brexit result in June 2016 but continues to serve as a member of the European parliament. He has previously supported Mr Trump as “Mr Brexit” and was suggested by the President as a candidate for UK ambassador to the US, which was quickly shot down by Downing Street as having “no vacancy”.

Mr Farage is now working to maintain pressure on the UK government to deliver Brexit without a transition period and said he would not rule out a return to frontline politics if “we don’t get the Brexit we voted for”.

He said those who were “appalled by Brexit and Trump” should brace themselves for the years ahead as rising populist politics is set to continue.

“The revolution of ‘16 isn’t over, it’s actually barely begun …. I do see the revolution across the west, the pivot point of 2016, continuing for many more years to come and I have to say I’m rather excited about it.”

On the growing scandal around Cambridge Analytica, a research firm linked to the Leave. EU campaign during the Brexit referendum, Mr Farage described the company as having an “aggressive hard sell with a touch of snake oil” after CEO Alexander Nix was recorded on hidden camera apparently suggesting a ‘honey trap’ style plot for political candidates.

Mr Farage said while the Leave. EU campaign had planned to work with the group if they got designation as the official campaign, that went instead to Vote Leave and “we didn’t sign a contract with them”.