Republican senators generally seemed to agree that the Justice Department had been “weaponized” under President Joe Biden to target Trump, who faced two federal prosecutions for his attempt to undo the 2020 presidential election and for hoarding secret documents after he left office.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s nominee to direct the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), once declared that his first act in power would be to “shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state”.