Expect that a President Ron DeSantis would have a firm hand on federal law enforcement agencies, if comments made Saturday in Iowa mean anything.
During an event in Clinton Saturday, the Republican candidate told supporters that the idea that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are “independent agencies” is just a “canard” that allows them to be unaccountable to the Executive Branch.
DeSantis said “part of the reason you’ve seen these agencies weaponized is because they haven’t been held accountable by anybody for many, many decades.”
“There’s this canard in Washington that they’re ‘independent agencies’, that the President’s not allowed to be involved in DOJ or FBI. That’s politicizing justice is what they say,” the Governor griped. “Well, let me tell you this, if you’re not allowed to be involved, if they’re independent, that’s another way of saying they’re unaccountable to anybody.”
DeSantis claimed that “The Founders understood” that if power is allowed to “accumulate,” then those agencies would naturally “abuse their power.”
“And these agencies are in Washington DC. It’s toxic,” DeSantis argued. “It’s a political environment, left of the left, DC is the most Democrat jurisdiction in the entire United States of America, more Democrat than San Francisco even. And that bleeds into everything that these agencies are doing.”
DeSantis said he might move the FBI Civil Rights division to “Oklahoma” or “Arkansas” in seeming response to that registration imbalance.
Throughout the campaign, DeSantis has weighed in on different and allegedly subjective standards of justice from federal law enforcement, on issues big and small, including cocaine found in the White House over the summer.
When discussing that powder in July, the Governor suggested there was a nefarious cover up to protect the President’s interests.
“Isn’t it interesting how you have this cocaine there? I don’t see the FBI and the Department of Justice mobilizing and doing like a real serious litigation of this. I kind of feel like if they’re a Republican White House that you’d have swarms of (Drug Enforcement Administration) and FBI agents trying to get to the bottom of who brought that into the White House. I think with this, they’re just treating the Joe Biden administration with kid gloves,” Ron DeSantis told the Newsmax audience.
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