US Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has broken ranks with his party by arguing that the FBI was politicized to take down Donald Trump – both before and after he was elected president in 2016 – making a “mockery” of the US political process.
“This is no partisan skirmish,” Kennedy said on Monday in a Twitter post. “It is about the political weaponization of the FBI to destroy a candidate and then a sitting president. It’s about a matrix of lies so elaborate as to make a mockery of the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry.”
Kennedy made his comments in response to last week’s release of the Durham Report, which concluded that the FBI violated its own standards in starting an investigation into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
Special prosecutor John Durham’s four-year probe found that the agency based its case on unverified allegations – leading to the ‘Russiagate’ investigation during Trump’s presidency – and became a funnel for disinformation from Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
CNN and other US media outlets that touted the Trump-Russia allegations for years downplayed the Durham Report, calling the damning findings about the FBI a “whole big nothing.” Kennedy said the media’s role in the attacks on Trump was “maybe most troubling of all.” He added: “The Durham Report reveals the abject complicity of the mainstream press, which has yet to admit they were taken in by the big lie, propagated it and now continues to permit those lies to stand as truth.”
Kennedy is a nephew of former President John F. Kennedy Jr. and son of 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated. Earlier this month, he claimed that the FBI was behind the 1963 murder of his uncle and was likely involved in the killing of his father. He has a history of anti-establishment viewpoints, such as speaking out on the alleged dangers of some vaccines, calling for the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, decrying Washington’s escalation of the Ukraine crisis, and criticizing the US military industrial complex.
Kennedy likened the media’s handling of Russiagate to its support for false allegations by former President George W. Bush’s administration that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He called the two narratives “mendacious mythologies,” saying they were “lies, lies and more lies.”