New FBI rules threaten to expose agents to blackmail by foreign spies: ex-official

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe said new rules that would allow hiring agents with a history of prostitution-related criminal charges are "confounding."

During a Friday appearance on CNN, McCabe tried to make sense of the changes. Reporting from the Associated Press said that the FBI is changing how it screens job applicants, with past experiences with prostitution no longer automatically disqualifying for every candidate.

"The reporting is confounding," McCabe said. "It raises the question in your mind, Why would they make this change?"

McCabe noted that engaging in prostitution or "supporting" prostitution is illegal in every state, "so we're talking about committing a crime."

On top of that, FBI agents are susceptible to blackmail for prostitution, so engaging in it "makes you more vulnerable to coercion or manipulation by criminal actors or foreign adversaries," McCabe said.

"There's a very serious security reason why you don't want to hire people who have done things in their background, like violating the law, committed crimes, committed sexual offenses that they would prefer the rest of the world not know about," McCabe said. "Things that you want to hide make you more vulnerable, so there are many good reasons to exclude applicants on these grounds."

McCabe then speculated on why the FBI is lowering its standards and said it likely has to do with a struggle to hire new agents.

"I don't know that we have a clear answer to that, but one reason might be that they're really struggling to recruit people," McCabe said. "Maybe they have fired so many people and lost so many people through attrition over the last year that they're struggling on the hiring side."

However, McCabe said it's still "hard to imagine" that would be the case "because we've always had a wealth of candidates. Or maybe they're trying to create a pathway for people who traditionally have not been able to get into the FBI, which raises its own concerns."