Former President Donald Trump's rivals in the 2024 election put aside their differences to condemn the FBI and Justice Department following the release of special counsel John Durham's report on the Trump-Russia investigation.
Durham released the long-awaited report on Tuesday, finding that the DOJ had no proper basis to launch the investigation and neither agency "appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion" at the end of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
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Since its release, Republicans across the board, including those running against Trump in 2024, have slammed the DOJ and FBI for political bias and a failure in judgment.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who has not announced a bid for the White House but is considered Trump's leading rival, said on Tuesday that the Durham report "confirmed what we already knew" about the "false conspiracy theory" that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
DeSantis, who has long referred to the Trump-Russia investigation as a "goose chase," reiterated his call for an overhaul of federal agencies and departments.
"It reminds us of the need to clean house at these agencies, as they've never been held accountable for this egregious abuse of power," DeSantis tweeted.
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy went even further, repeating his call to shut down the FBI, which he called a "corrupt institution."
"This is deeply concerning," Ramaswamy said of the report on Tuesday to Fox News. "The next president needs to shut down the FBI. This is a corrupt institution that has repeatedly revealed itself to be politicized."
"I think when you have an administrative rot that runs that deep, you cannot reform it top down — you have to actually shut it down," he continued, adding that having the FBI work in between the U.S. Marshals and the DOJ is a "formula for corruption."
2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley released a similar statement, calling for consequences.
"The Durham report is damning evidence of the rot in our government," Haley tweeted. "No party, no politician should weaponize government to go after political opponents. There must be consequences, or this will never end."
On the other side, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR), who announced his candidacy for president in early April, said he fears Trump will use the Durham report's findings to undermine respect for the U.S. justice system.
"The problem we will see is Donald Trump will use this as a means to undermine all of law enforcement, use it as a means to undermine our institutions that are so important in our justice system," Hutchinson said, pointing to Trump's response to the recent court verdict that found him liable for sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll.
"We don't want a criticism of that to undermine the respect that we have for our civil justice system and our criminal justice system. That is what you can expect from Donald Trump, rather than serious reform and serious effort," he continued.
Trump reacted to the report's release, saying the public had been "scammed."
"WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe!" Trump wrote. "In other words, the American Public was scammed, just as it is being scammed right now by those who don’t want to see GREATNESS for AMERICA!"
Durham's report did fall short of uncovering the "crime of the century," as Trump speculated, and Durham did not recommend any criminal charges.
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The FBI said in a statement that the agency had already implemented "dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time" in response to Durham's report.
"Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented,” the FBI stated.