Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on Thursday slammed Republicans who are advocating for a major overhaul of federal law enforcement.
McCaskill during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight” was commenting on new reporting form The New York Times suggesting momentum within the GOP is growing to eliminate the traditionally independent roles the Department of Justice and the FBI play in government, and that former President Donald Trump is leading the charge.
Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman write for The New York Times that “Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been 'weaponized' against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a façade — that the department should operate independently from the president.”
Wagner referenced a recent Fox News chyron that referenced President Joe Biden as a “wannabe dictator,” for which the right-wing network later apologized.
The MSBC host cited a May 24 Fox News interview in which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared to support the idea of decoupling federal law enforcement from the executive branch.
“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” DeSantis said.
“They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”
The MSNBC host asked McCaskill to comment “On the surreality and I guess the hypocrisy of this moment to see Republicans accusing Joe Biden of being a wannabe dictator and then embracing a kind of new form of governing that would effectively allow the next Republican president to be a wannabe dictator.”
“It's really weird, first of all, Harvard Law School is calling Ron DeSantis, they want their degree back,” McCaskill said.
“It is beyond embarrassing that he is an educated man who is spouting this stuff. The same thing with some of these other people who are saying, ‘let's blow up you know the rule of law in this country.’ They always want to talk about the Founding Fathers."
"Do you think the Founding Fathers would be good with this? That we would have some kind of king-like figure that could direct people to arrest people on a whim?"
McCaskill suggested that the guardrails of American democracy preserved the rule of law during Trump’s presidency.
“The rule of law held under Donald Trump because there were women who made sure it did even though he tried to blow up that line and think about this for a minute. If Joe Biden is somehow manipulating the Justice Department, why in the world would he leave a Trump prosecutor in charge his own son’s investigation?:
“This this is so bizarre to me. I mean, he clearly is trying to stay so far away from this just as they did in the Obama administration. I’ll never forget what they did in the Obama administration. When I actually tried to talk to the President about what was going on in Ferguson and he put up his hands and said ‘Claire, I will not talk about anything that has to do with DOJ. Will not talk about it."'
“You're welcome to call DOJ and talk to them and make sure they know what you think you know, but I will not talk to you about it," the ex-Senator said. "That is the rule in this country. It's always in the rule. The only one who wants to blow that up is Donald Trump, because he doesn't have either the facts or the law on his side.”
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