DeSantis Pledges to Go to War on ‘Weaponized’ Feds

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DeSantis Pledges to Go to War on ‘Weaponized’ Feds

Real Clear Politics reported that if elected president, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis plans to dismantle and rebuild the Department of Justice and the FBI.

More from Philip Wegmann at RCP:

The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a “disciplined” and “relentless” strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the “Founding Fathers envisioned.”

But his ambitions go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. He wants to physically remove large swathes of the DOJ from the District of Columbia, including FBI headquarters, RealClearPolitics is first to report.

“We’re not going to let all this power accumulate in Washington, we’re going to break up these agencies,” DeSantis said during a private strategy session over the weekend, excerpts of which were obtained exclusively by RCP. He vowed in that call to order “some of the problematic components of the DOJ” be uprooted, reorganized, and then promptly “shipped to other parts of the country.”

This fits with one of the central themes of the DeSantis campaign, namely that he’d be “an energetic executive,” a president with the focus and attention to detail necessary to make the most of his Article II powers. On the stump, the governor regularly wins applause from primary voters for promising not just to wage war on the so-called deep state, but to end it.

The article noted that DeSantis also plans to crack down on leaking, misinformation, and progressive prosecutors, while revoking security clearances of former intelligence officials. He campaigns on a platform of confronting the administrative state, aiming to make significant reforms to the DOJ if elected president.

A worthy goal for any Republican elected official. In yesterday’s Transom, Ben Domenech discussed:

Other candidates, notably Vivek Ramaswamy, who appeared on hand in a “TRUTH”-emblazoned hat speaking through a megaphone, have signaled their loud opposition to the case. Only a handful of elected Republicans have thus far backed the idea that the charges are fully justified by the former president’s actions — most instead are sounding a note of defiance and channeling GOP voter anger at the FBI, the DoJ and the “Deep State” that has purportedly targeted Trump for years.

What remains is the question about why this case ever got this far to begin with — why Trump held on to so much material, including many clearly classified documents of national security import, well past the point where it became clear this put him in a legally precarious position. Negotiation over such documents is a very normal thing to happen after presidencies, with the complicated negotiation of archival interests and in the context of a general overclassification of records. But as C.J. Ciaramella points out, in Trump’s case, the most rational theory as to why he wouldn’t just let these boxes go is to think in simple terms — they’re his, so he’s keeping them.

RELATED: JD Vance vows to block Biden’s DOJ nominees in protest of Trump indictment (New York Post)