Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) claimed Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has “nightmarish views” that would “shut down part of the FBI.” “The FBI helps protect us.” Against foreign terrorism.
“Remember the history of all this,” Whitehouse said. We, as Americans, made a decision long ago that we did not want the CIA and other American intelligence agencies inside the United States working against Americans. The FBI had criminal law enforcement responsibility and focused on terrorism primarily as a criminal enterprise.
He continued: “Then 9/11 came and people realized that the firewall between the intelligence community that looked outward and the FBI that only looked inward at criminal matters was a recipe for failure and that we needed to coordinate better. We needed to remove the firewall, and make sure that That the FBI knows where its corridors are, and that the Intelligence Committee knows where its corridors are is actually a very successful shift and a very important development in the response to 9/11 and to be completely unaware of that and think that the FBI had no appropriate role that “He thinks the CIA should come in and start doing the FBI’s work in the United States? Or do we just stop looking at terrorism preventatively? We just look at it when a crime happens and go investigate.”
“With Patel, you don’t have to stretch,” Whitehouse added. He puts it there. He will shut down the part of the FBI that helps protect us against foreign terrorism. He’s going to close the Hoover Building, and I’m not a big fan of the Hoover Building, but on day one? That’s a lot of confusion. Where do people go to work now? Then, of course, he has his enemies list of people he thinks the FBI should go to work on and he’ll bring with him. And he’s got a pledge to prosecute people like you civilly or criminally, he says, if the press, in his view, in the government’s view, isn’t telling the truth. So any one of those would be very disruptive. And the fact that he brings all of these kind of nightmarish viewpoints to the job is going to be a lively listen.
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