A former FBI agent revealed on Thursday that the Trump administration's repeated episodes of "spewing lies" have had a significant impact on his former colleagues inside federal law enforcement.
Michael Feinberg is a former FBI agent who was fired earlier this year after he was found to have socialized with President Donald Trump's foe, Peter Strzok. He discussed the impact of Trump's lies on federal law enforcement on MSNBC's "Deadline White House" with Nicolle Wallace.
"The unhesitatingly immediate jump to spewing lies and dissembling about the truth by the White House essentially means that no FBI agent and no line prosecutor is going to want to work on anything remotely politically controversial for the sheer fact that a successor administration can target them, regardless of whether they did everything right, regardless of whether the case was factually predicated, regardless of whether they had maine justice support, a president can now come in and essentially say well, the facts that you cite aren't true," said Feinberg.
He noted that a new administration could simply "quote Kellyanne Conway and say, 'we have access to alternative facts.'"
"And instead of actually trying to get to the truth, we get into some, like, satire of a graduate literature seminar where we're debating what the truth even means. This isn't how a country, let alone an investigative agency, is supposed to function," he closed.
The White House announced it would be investigating a "conspiracy" by former President Barack Obama and his top aides in trying to "subvert" the 2016 election. The effort was spearheaded not by the Justice Department or FBI but by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
According to Trump, Obama "manufactured evidence" to justify "baseless smears against President Trump."
"Literally every line of that is untrue," Wallace said.