During his first television interview after announcing his entry into the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday, Florida governor Ron DeSantis vowed to fire FBI director Christopher Wray on day one of his presidency should he be elected.
Appearing on Fox News shortly after launching his campaign on Twitter, DeSantis was asked by Trey Gowdy how he would go about reforming the FBI given the numerous abuses exposed by House Republicans.
“No I would not keep Chris Wray as director of the FBI. There’d be a new one on Day One. I think that’s very important,” DeSantis responded when asked if FBI director Wray would keep his job in a DeSantis administration.
“I think the DOJ and FBI have lost their way. I think that they’ve been weaponized against Americans who think like me and you, and I think they’ve become very partisan. Part of the reason that’s happened, Trey, is because Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and FBI are independent,” said DeSantis. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”
DeSantis promised to hold the agencies accountable if elected, “clearing out people who are not doing the job and making sure they’re doing the people’s business and they’re not abusing their authority.”
“For example if the FBI or DOJ were to ever collude with a tech company to try to censor information, everybody involved with that would be fired immediately if I was president,” DeSantis said in an apparent reference to Facebook restricting a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop based on a tip from the FBI. “When there’s no accountability, the bad behavior’s going to continue.”
DeSantis served on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees when he was a member of Congress. Since Republicans reclaimed a House majority, those panels have focused on exposing alleged abuses by the Department of Justice and the bureau specifically. In recent weeks, there have been a number of reports of FBI malfeasance, including warrantless searches of Americans’s communications and allegations the agency has targeted conservatives.
Special counsel John Durham also released a report earlier this month which found the agency did not uphold its mission of strict fidelity to the law during its investigation of the debunked ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The Florida governor also explained that he would select an attorney general that’s got a really strong backbone.
“You need somebody that knows if you’re going in there and you’re taking care of business, the Washington Post is not going to like you, the New York Times is not going to like you. You’re going to get attacked by CNN. And you’ve got to wear that as a badge of honor. You can’t try to please polite society because otherwise you’ll just get captured by the institution itself,” DeSantis said.
Asked to weigh in on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, DeSantis said he would want a “settlement,” but also took the chance to return to his point that various parts of the government have become politicized.
“First what we need to do is recognize that our military has become politicized. You talk about gender ideology. You talk about things like global warming…that’s not the military that I served in. We need to return our military to focusing on commitment, focusing on the core value and core mission,” DeSantis said.
“There’ll be a new sheriff in town as commander in chief and I think you’ll see recruiting start to get back to where it needs to be because people don’t want to join a woke military and I think it’s been really problematic,” he added.
The governor explained more broadly that one of his priorities is to “reconstitutionalize the administrative state.”
“We have a bureaucracy that’s totally out of control. You need to be willing to use Article II power to bring the administrative state to heel. I will do that,” DeSantis said.
“Congress also has a role in reining in the abuses through both the power of the purse and through making sure they’re legislating clear and defined laws that aren’t delegating huge swathes of power to unelected bureaucrats,” DeSantis added.
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