Former President Donald Trump on Monday applauded Special Counsel John Durham’s report concluding that the FBI never had any evidence of Russia collusion to justify its probe of his campaign in 2016, calling it a “total vindication” personally and vowing to make sweeping changes at the bureau and Justice Department if he wins back the presidency in 2024.
“I was very honored by this report,” Trump said in an interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast at Just the News. “I’ll be honest, the detail was incredible. I waited and everybody waited, and we waited a long time. But this is tremendous detail when you look at it. He’s obviously very detail oriented.
“But this is tremendous detail, total vindication,” he said of the 300-plus page Durham report released Monday by the department, under which Durham was special counsel.
Trump said the effort by rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her allies in the federal bureaucracy to create a false Russia collusion allegation against his campaign affected two consecutive elections.
“It’s a shame,” he said. “It’s a total violation of about every rule and principle you can have. It’s total dishonesty, and more than anything else that affected the 2020 presidential election, much more so than the 2016 election.”
Trump said he believed DOJ and FBI officials went along with investigating an allegation without evidence because they feared the changes he was about to make to the federal bureaucracy and their agencies. He said the agencies were loaded at the time with Democrats and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) who did not support him.
“A lot of bad things went on at DOJ and the FBI, and a lot of bad things went on a lot of places,” Trump told Just the News. “You know, when I got there, it was loaded up with RINOS, and with Democrats. There’s thousands and thousands of people in every different department.
By John Solomon
