Donald Trump welcomes John Durham report criticizing FBI on Russian collusion probe

Donald Trump Responded to the Department of Justice Special Counsel John Durham Reports on the Origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia InvestigationStating that the findings corroborate their claims of baseless harassment.

“It’s a great endorsement and it feels good, and the report has been widely praised,” Trump told Newsmax in a phone interview Tuesday night.

‘All these people are – I guess you could call it treason. You can call it many different things. But this should not be allowed to happen again in our country.

The former president is pinning the blame for the controversial FBI investigation of his own campaign on his 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton.

“It really started when she lost the election,” Trump said. ‘He called it a big, big surprise, and he didn’t know what to say. And they said, “Let’s blame it on Russia.” Somehow someone got this idea, let’s put the blame for its loss on Russia.

‘It was really an excuse as to why she lost the election. He blamed it on Russia. And it’s very sad, very bad for our country.’

In his report, Durham noted that he interviewed Clinton as part of an investigation into her campaign’s alleged effort to tie Trump to Russian election interference, but found no ‘capable criminal offenses’ on the part of the Democratic nominee.

Durham’s 306-page report focuses negatively on one of the most politically significant investigations in FBI history: the investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign conspired with Russia to tip off the election outcome. Was.

The findings are not flattering to the FBI, with Durham finding that the agency participated in the investigation without sufficient basis and routinely ignored or rationalized evidence that undermined its basis.

The report lists a series of errors—though many had already been documented years earlier by a separate Justice Department inspector general report. The FBI says it has taken several dozen corrective steps on its own.

Trump has long branded the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, which the bureau code-named Crossfire Hurricane, as a politically motivated ‘witch hunt’, a label he has applied to himself and his business interests. It has also been applied to a myriad of other criminal and civil investigations targeting behavior. ,

In Tuesday’s interview, Trump said the Durham report justified his controversial 2017 move to fire FBI Director James Comey, which he described as ‘a very wise thing to do.

Trump said, ‘I inherited that, but he got us rid of it and it’s a good thing I did, otherwise it would have been worse.’

Trump, the leading candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, argued that the current legal issues he is facing are a continuation of the FBI’s ‘fake investigation’ into the crossfire storm.

‘You look at the hoax of boxes,’ he said, apparently referring to the DOJ investigation into classified records that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office, ‘you see all the different things and all those people. Let’s look at the ones they tried. To terrorize It is an insult.’

‘It goes on, it goes on with these people. And they’re sick, you know, they’re sick people,’ he said.

In the Newsmax interview, Trump also declined to take a position on Florida’s six-week ban on abortion, a measure spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to win the GOP presidential nomination against Trump.

‘Now DeSantis, or Ron DeSanctimonius as I call him, he came out with six weeks to go. Others agree with it, and many people don’t,’ Trump said.

Trump cited his Supreme Court nomination to pave the way for overturning Roe v Wade’s federal protections for abortion rights, saying it would pave the way for a national agreement on the issue.

“We are now in a position where we can get something that the whole country can agree on,” Trump said.

‘On Pro-Life, I’ll tell you what I did on Roe v Wade, no one else for 50 years – they were trying to do and I accomplished it. And now we are in a position to make a really great deal and the kind of deal that people want,’ he said.

The interview came shortly before the Trump-endorsed Daniel Cameron won the Republican primary for governor of Kentucky on Tuesday.

Cameron, Kentucky’s current attorney general, has become the first black major-party nominee for governor in the state’s history, and will face Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear in November.

Cameron had secured Trump’s endorsement, but faced off against another candidate closely associated with the former president, Kelly Craft, who served as ambassador to the United States in the Trump administration.

Durham found in his report Monday that the FBI did not have enough “factual evidence” to investigate allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.

Durham’s report is a comprehensive summary of findings related to the investigation into whether the then-Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere with the 2016 election results.

It found that the Justice Department and the FBI ‘failed to uphold their mission of strict adherence to the law’ when launching the Trump-Russia investigation.

The special counsel on Friday transmitted the report to Attorney General Merrick Garland on his four-year investigation that cost more than $6 million in taxpayer dollars.

The attorney general provided a copy Monday to top members of Congress.

Durham wrote in the report: ‘Based on the evidence collected in several detailed and costly federal investigations into these cases, including the immediate investigation, neither US law enforcement nor the intelligence community has any real evidence of collusion in their holdings. . The beginning of the investigation of the firing storm.’

‘The speed and manner in which the FBI conducted and investigated the crossfire storm based on raw, unanalyzed and unconfirmed intelligence during presidential election season marks a remarkable departure from prior cases involving possible foreign election guessing schemes aimed at Clinton. indicates departure. campaign,’ the report continues.