Amid reports that career Justice and State Department employees are already being fired as President Donald Trump's administration tries to appoint more political allies to serve in those positions, a former prosecutor lamented Wednesday on MSNBC that the right appears hellbent on chasing shadows — to the detriment of functioning government.
One of the pledges from "Project 2025" discussed the removal of all employment protections in place to allow a mass government firing. It's part of the Heritage Foundation’s initiative to install 50,000 conservative movement activists to work in government posts.
Republican Party members have long argued that government isn't effective or so inefficient that it must be radically slashed, wrote Max Burns for CNN.
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Former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann described an administration so easily fooled by their own conspiracies that they're harming the law enforcement necessary for the Trump agenda.
"On the one hand, I'm taking them at their word that they think there's a deep state and somebody and that these are people who somehow are not going to follow lawful orders because they have some political agenda," said Weissmann. "And one that is a complete misread, that is projecting onto the Department of Justice what you may be thinking, which is that you are all about transaction and politics and power and money."
The "big picture," he said, is that places like the DOJ and FBI have a necessary service to enforce the law, and those institutions will be made "dramatically less effective" even for those things that are in the Trump agenda.
"Do you want to counter drug gangs, fentanyl gangs, terrorism, organized crime, child predators? These are the people you need. And so you are now absolutely sort of pulling people from that mission," he continued.
Some might look at it as the Trump government being less effective, but those are "groups that need to be targeted."
"There will be another Katrina. There will be a terrorism event. You need to be proactive to make the country safe on the criminal side," continued Weissmann. "It's so dumb as a policy to do this. I mean, I hate to be sort of coarse in the language, but it just makes no sense at all. And I think it has to come from either, you just don't want the institution to work, or from a really misguided notion of what is animating these people."
See his comments below or at the link here.
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