A Justice Department veteran described how Donald Trump's attorney general nominee could destroy the federal law enforcement agency from the inside.
Andrew McCabe, who became acting FBI director when Trump fired James Comey but was then pushed out himself in what he has called a purge of disloyal officials, told CNN that former congressman Matt Gaetz was chosen to lead the department so he could exact revenge for the president-elect.
"I have no doubt that that's the marching orders," McCabe said. "Let's face the obvious fact here, Matt Gaetz is profoundly unqualified for this job in any of the traditional, normal kind of requirements sense of what the attorney general does day to day. This is the first step, likely, in Trump's revenge tour against the Department of Justice, the department he bears such animus and such a grudge against for the way that he believes he was mistreated by the multiple investigations targeting him over the last couple of years."
McCabe drew on his decades of experience working for the DOJ to describe the damage Gaetz could do if he becomes attorney general.
"Matt Gaetz [is being] sent into the Department of Justice to cause chaos, to fire people from critical positions, to leave positions empty, to vacate long-standing guidance and policy positions and replace them with nothing, to unfund programs that are, for whatever reason, disfavored by the president," McCabe said. "You can imagine all of these things happening at a time when a department of 1 million people and multiple component agencies relies on the department to provide legal advice and direction and prosecutorial expertise on a daily basis. None of this should be surprising to the American people. This is exactly what Donald Trump has talked about for months during the campaign, and Matt Gaetz appears to be his chosen tool to go in and wreak that sort of panic."
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