A former high-ranking FBI official warned that President Donald Trump’s latest move has left the United States vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
Emil Bove, the president’s former personal defense lawyer and current acting deputy attorney general, ordered the firing of agents involved in the Jan. 6 riot cases, as well as the removal of eight senior executives.
Frank Figliuzzi, the former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the mass firings jeopardized national security.
“If Trump was thinking, ‘I’m going to somehow get rid of some folks and I’m going to own the FBI, they’re going to be with me,’ he’s lost that, and the potential that Kash Patel would be walking into an agency that is totally demoralized and against him is now quite high,” said Figliuzzi.
“Our adversaries would spend tens of millions of dollars for an operation that created this kind of chaos at the FBI,” according to him. “Finally, look how this makes America less safe.
You have layers upon layers of management, and now possibly thousands of the best agents in the field are no longer available, so there is no continuity of operations at any given time.”
He likened the situation to Trump and his billionaire benefactor Elon Musk removing the director of the Federal Aviation Administration a week before the fatal midair collision.
“The FBI is tracking multiple terror plots in this country, and God help us if one of those terror plots is in an office where multiple layers of management and multiple layers of star agents have been removed,” says Figliuzzi.
“You believe that the tragedy in D.C. and the plane crash with no one home at the FAA were tragic – and they were. If we’re looking at a terror attack because no one at the FBI is home, that’s on Trump.
Host Joe Scarborough stated that if the United States is hit by a terrorist attack, Republican senators should share responsibility.
“Well, actually, it’s also on Republicans in the Senate,” Scarborough said. “They have to decide who will lead the FBI, but there’s an old saying in all of these intelligence agencies: nobody writes about a bomb that doesn’t go off, right?
“But there aren’t bombs going off every day because of our intelligence agencies, and this isn’t one of them. I’m not saying the FBI doesn’t need to be reformed, and I’m not saying it’s not political because it is. Democrats will tell you that in 2016, it was extremely political and targeted Hillary Clinton.
Republicans will tell you the same thing about Donald Trump, so both sides have complained that the FBI is sometimes overly political. That is the nature of all intelligence agencies, including the CIA. This is the nature of the agencies.
“The problem is, though, you cannot rip it up by its roots when you have terrorists every day wanting to kill Americans.”