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Rep. Matt Gaetz demanded that the FBI be defunded and its agents criminally indicted after a report found that the bureau lacked evidence to launch an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in 2016.
Trump-era special counsel John Durham on Monday produced a 300-page report summing up his four-year review of the FBI’s actions, which found that the agency rushed into its investigation, relied too heavily on raw and unconfirmed intelligence, and “willfully ignored” or rationalized away information that did not support its collusion theory.
Gaetz (R-Fla.), a staunch Trump ally, ripped into the bureau following the release of the report, which he touted in a tweet as an “absolutely DAMNING treatise on the weaponization of the FBI against President Trump.”
During an interview on Newsmax Monday night, Gaetz accused the FBI of becoming “the enforcement wing of the Democratic Party to play offense against Trump,” and argued that the agency should face harsh consequences for its wrongdoings.
“I think we have to deauthorize, defang and defund many of these authorities and entities and different task forces that actually converted the just and righteous act of protecting our country with the desire to have a particular political candidate win or lose,” the lawmaker said.
