Monday on CNN’s “News Central,” former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe claimed that President Donald Trump taking federal control of the police department in Washington, D.C., will cause “major impacts on the safety and security of this country.”
McCabe said, “There’s a lot that worries me about this. You know, first of all, the it’s hard to explain the lack of pushback by D.C. authorities right now. I would suspect they’re probably trying to get their heads around this entire thing. It’s absolutely so bizarre.”
He continued, “You are now looking at things like having hundreds of FBI agents, quote, unquote, patrol the streets of D.C., this is not something that FBI agents do. They’re not trained for it. They don’t plan on that. They don’t have that sort of legal authority intrinsically. So to understand exactly how FBI agents are going to start making arrests around D.C., again on areas that are not federal property, that is not something that has been worked out in any way.”
McCabe added, “Now let’s think about the opportunity cost, all of those counterterrorism cases, counterintelligence cases, criminal cases, crimes against children, all the things that we rely on, FBI agents to protect us from every day that work is not getting done because you’ve taken that resource, some percentage of it, and shifted it to patrolling D.C., which is something that the FBI does not do and really cannot do in its current state, competently or safely for themselves or for the citizens of the District. So really questionable decisions here that will have major impacts on the safety and security of this country.”