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‘Defang and defund them!’ Gaetz demands legislative reform over ‘DAMNING’ Durham report

May 16, 2023 | | Print Article

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is demanding that FBI agents be fired and indicted after the Durham report was released, concluding that the agency should never have gone after former President Trump in the first place in a move widely seen as blatant political persecution.

The firebrand conservative stated that the FBI should be “defanged” and “defunded.” He called the actions of the agency “ugly,” according to the Daily Mail.

“The Durham report is an absolutely DAMNING treatise on the weaponization of the FBI against President Trump. This should be a clarion call for legislative reform. We need to defund and deauthorize government entities that are converted from the just cause of defending our nation into enforcement wings of political parties,” Gaetz tweeted.

He went on to remark that Special Counsel John Durham’s recommendation that only one individual, an attorney who lied to the FBI, be charged with wrongdoing was “insufficient.”

“This report is an insufficient consequence for the malfeasance and corruption that we have seen here,” Gaetz declared.

“It was an operation from beginning to end to fuse political opposition research from the DNC and the Clinton campaign with this intelligence process and criminal process. And it’s a sad day in America. If that had been a Republican operation – an operation to help a Republican candidate – it wouldn’t have ended in a report: it would have ended with real significant indictments,” he asserted.

The 300-page report was released on Monday after a four-year investigation. It found that the FBI relied on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” to go after Trump.

Trump and a long line of Republicans slammed the report. The former president accused the FBI of a plot to overthrow his presidency.

The Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Gaetz contended that the report shows that the FBI is dangerously partisan. Jordan has invited Durham to testify in front of the committee next week.

Appearing on Newsmax Monday, Gaetz charged that the FBI had morphed into “the enforcement wing of the Democratic Party to play offense against Trump.”

“It’s very ugly for our country and it’s very ugly for the future of a democracy where the people make the choices – not the law enforcement and intelligence officers,” he raged. “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 only indictment that Durham is able to cite here is the indictment of Kevin Clinesmith. This was the FBI lawyer who changed evidence before a secret court. And guess what? He’s already back to practicing law. Got his law license back, and practicing law here in DC now. Insufficient,” Gaetz angrily and justifiably stated.

“In a proper world, Republicans and Democrats would be able to work together on this. Because it wasn’t that long ago that the FBI was a right-wing organization, weaponized against civil rights leaders and others. And it was wrong then, and it’s wrong now,” the GOP representative continued.

He branded the report as “a clarion call to every Republican.”

“We cannot continue to fund the FBI at its current level. And I think we should claw back the $325 million that Nancy Pelosi had gifted for the new FBI headquarters in the DC area. That’s a bad thing for people’s civil liberties. There should be firings, and there should be reform, and it should be bipartisan,” the congressman added.

And then there is the matter of Hillary Clinton who got this whole thing rolling in the first place. Durham revealed that he had questioned former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in May 2022. She, of course, denied everything. He claims he did not find any “provable criminal offense,” despite the fact that she smeared Trump nine ways from Sunday over the Russia hoax ahead of the 2016 election.

He did, however, state that the FBI should have done more to look into a Russian intelligence analysis that suggested 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had personally approved a plan to “vilify” her opponent Donald Trump by claiming foreign interference in the election.

Clinton was questioned on declassified information by the then-Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe about her “alleged plan” to “stir up a scandal between Trump and the Russians.”

She responded that it “looked like Russian disinformation to me; they’re very good at it, you know.”

Durham also interviewed “several other former members” of the Clinton campaign, including John Podesta and President Biden’s current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

He commented that despite the government’s handling of the “Clinton Plan,” the garnered intelligence amounted to a “significant intelligence failure” and indicated “confirmation bias.” But he said it did “not amount to a provable criminal offense.”

That assertion enraged Republicans who want the FBI and Clinton to answer for all of this.

An analyst couldn’t even remember what was done to investigate the “Clinton Plan” according to Durham, “For example, [an FBI intelligence analyst] stated that he could not recall anything that the FBI did to analyze, or otherwise consider the Clinton Plan intelligence, stating that it was ‘just one data point.'”

“This stands in sharp contrast to its substantial reliance on the uncorroborated Steele Reports, which at least some FBI personnel appeared to know was likely being funded or promoted by the Clinton campaign,” Durham noted.

Former President Obama was slammed over the report as well.

House GOP Chairwoman Elise Stefanik hammered the report, calling it a “criminal abuse of power” on the part of Obama.

“This criminal abuse of power went all the way up to the Oval Office where President Obama and then Vice President Joe Biden were in on it from the very beginning. This was an unlawful attempt by the politicized FBI and DOJ to meddle in our elections,” she told the Daily Mail.

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