Ex-Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele took on President Donald Trump on Saturday after he claimed he “wasn’t involved” in FBI firings that have reportedly swept up top officials as well as federal prosecutors linked to Jan. 6 criminal cases.
Steele, one of the hosts of MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” said there was “just so much” he wanted to “unpack” with a clip of the president, who distanced himself from the moves by his Justice Department while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday.
“If they fired some people over there, that’s a good thing, because they were very bad. They were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization,” Trump said.
Steele promptly checked the president on his claim.
“Can we just cut the crap? Because the FBI is not going to fire anybody at that scale without the White House knowing about it,” Steele said.
The removals have included all of the FBI’s “most senior” executives, “multiple” heads of FBI field offices and roughly two dozen prosecutors, NBC News reported.
Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, in a memo to the bureau on Friday night, said that acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove requested a list of employees who worked on cases tied to the deadly 2021 Capitol attack for “a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
“We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” Driscoll wrote. “I am one of those employees.”
NBC News justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly reminded Steele on the MSNBC “Weekend” panel about the Jan. 6 cases in the face of Trump’s claims.
“These were cases against violent offenders who assaulted law enforcement officers on the steps of the U.S. Capitol,” Reilly said.
“So it’s not as though you can say like, ‘Oh, we’re going after this specific person because we didn’t like how they applied this particular misdemeanor.’ No, they’re going after everyone,” he continued. “This was not like an individualized assessment of their conduct.”
Alicia Menendez, co-host of “The Weekend,” turned to a statement from the FBI Agents Association warning that “dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats” while setting it up “for failure” in the future.
Reilly argued that there weren’t “a ton of people” who worked on cases, adding that the Capitol riot “touched basically every part” of the FBI, including those who were briefly involved with matters such as arrests.
Check out more of the panel on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” below.
