President Donald Trump attacked the FBI on Tuesday night, calling them “scum” at a rally in Pennsylvania. This came in the wake of the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, which refuted Trump’s claims that the Russia probe was a “deep state” plot, meant to overthrow him from the presidency.
Trump reiterated claims that the FBI “spied” on his 2016 campaign. The report, released by the Justice Department’s IG Michael Horowitz, found Trump’s conclusion to be unsupported by facts.
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“When the FBI uncovered evidence showing that we did absolutely nothing wrong, which was right at the beginning, they hid that exonerating, you know that they hid it,” Trump said. “They hid it so nobody could see it and they could keep this hoax going on for two more years.”
The report found that the Russia investigation was kickstarted on the basis of multiple contacts between Trump campaign officials and the Russians.
“The FBI also sent multiple undercover human spies to surveil and record people associated with our campaign,” the president said. “Look how they’ve hurt people. They’ve destroyed the lives of people that were great people, that are till great people. Their lives have been destroyed by scum. OK, by scum.”
While Trump and his allies have often characterized the FBI’s surveillance as “spying,” the long-anticipated report found that the FBI followed its rules in opening an investigation into contacts between Russia and Trump officials and concluded that top officials were not driven by “political bias or improper motivation” in doing so.
