A former high-ranking FBI official warned that President Donald Trump had left the U.S. wide open to a terrorist attack with his administration's latest move.
The president's former personal defense lawyer Emil Bove, who is now acting deputy attorney general, ordered the firing of agents involved in Jan. 6 riot cases and the removal of eight senior executives. Frank Figliuzzi, who previously served as the FBI's assistant director for counterintelligence, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the mass firings weakened 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," Figliuzzi said.
"Our adversaries would spend tens of millions of dollars for an operation that created this kind of chaos at the FBI," he added. "Lastly, look, this makes America less safe. You've got layers upon layers of management, and now possibly the best agents in the field, thousands of them potentially, who are no longer available, there's no continuity of operations at any given time."
He compared the situation to Trump and his billionaire benefactor Elon Musk pushing out the director of the Federal Aviation Administration a week before the deadly 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," Figliuzzi said. "You think the tragedy in D.C. and the plane crash with no one home at the FAA was tragic – and it was. If we're looking at a terror attack because no one's home at the FBI, then that's on Trump."
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Host Joe Scarborough said Republican senators should share in the blame if the U.S. was hit by a terrorist attack.
"Well, it's actually, it's also on Republicans in the Senate," Scarborough said. "They have a decision to make on who's going to be running the FBI, but there's an old saying in all of these intel agencies, nobody writes a story about the bomb that doesn't go off, right?
"But there are bombs that don't go off every day because of our intel agencies, and this doesn't – I'm not saying the FBI doesn't need to be reformed, and I'm not saying it's not political because it is political. In 2016, Democrats will tell you, it was extraordinarily political and focused against Hillary Clinton. Republicans will tell you the same about Donald Trump, so there have been complaints on both sides about the fact that the FBI, at times, is too political. That's the nature of every intel agency, whether you're talking about the CIA, you name it. That's 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."
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