Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) claimed Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has “nightmare views” that will “close the part of the FBI that helps protect us” against foreign terrorism.
Whitehouse said, “Remember the history of all of this. We, for a long time as Americans, have made the determination that we did not want the CIA and other American intelligence agencies operating within the United States against Americans. And the FBI had a criminal law enforcement responsibility, and it was focused on terrorism primarily as a criminal act.”
He continued, “Then came 9/11 and people understood that the firewall between the intelligence community looking outward and the FBI only looking at criminal matters inward was a failed prescription and that we needed to coordinate better. We needed to take down the firewall, make sure that the FBI knew where its lanes were, the intelligence committee knew where its lanes were. It was actually a very successful shift and a very important development in the response to 9/11. And to be completely unaware of that and to think that the FBI has no proper role. What does he think the CIA should come in and start doing the FBI’s work in the United States? Or we just stop looking at terrorism preventively? We just look at it when a crime takes place and go investigate? It makes absolutely no sense.”
Whitehouse added, “With Patel, you don’t have to stretch. He puts it right out there. He’s going to close the part of the FBI that helps protect us against foreign terrorism. He’s going to shut down the Hoover building, which I’m no great fan of the Hoover building, but day one? That’s a lot of confusion. Where do people go to work now? then, of course, he’s got his enemies list of people who he thinks the FBI should go to work on that he’s going to be bringing with him. and he’s got his pledge to go after people like you civilly or criminally, he says, if, in his view, in the government’s view, the press isn’t telling the truth. So any one of those would be pretty disabling. and the fact that he brings all of this basket of sort of nightmare views to the job with him is going to be a lively hearing.”
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