President Trump on Thursday warned that the special counsel investigation into possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia’s election hacking “hurts our country.”

“I believe it hurts our country terribly, because it shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country,” Trump said at a luncheon with several TV news anchors.

“And we have very important things to be doing right now, whether it’s trade deals, whether it’s military, whether it’s stopping nuclear — all of the things that we discussed today. And I think this shows a very divided country,” Trump said.

Trump hosted David Muir of ABC, Fareed Zakaria and Jake Tapper of CNN and Savannah Guthrie of NBC for the White House lunch.

The president also charged that the investigation, to be led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, was motivated by efforts to tarnish his election victory.

“It also happens to be a pure excuse for the Democrats having lost an election that they should have easily won because of the Electoral College being slanted so much in their way. That’s all this is. I think it shows division, and it shows that we’re not together as a country. And I think it’s a very, very negative thing. And hopefully, this can go quickly, because we have to show unity if we’re going to do great things with respect to the rest of the world.”

Trump tweeted earlier Thursday that the probe was “the greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.“