EXCLUSIVE: The DeSantis Plan To Wage War on Weaponized DOJ | RealClearPolitics
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI, consulting with experts and members of Congress to develop a Day One strategy to end what conservatives see as the weaponization of the justice system.
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 goal, according to senior outside advisors, ought to be returning the DOJ and FBI to a more limited pre-9/11 mission. Republicans were outraged last Friday when former President Trump was indicted for mishandling classified documents. DeSantis has condemned that move, and his campaign scheduled the Saturday conference call not knowing, he told advisors, that there would be news last night. But the governor is also intimately familiar with conservative gripes about political bias inside President Biden s Department of Justice. They have been central to his campaign.
Worth a try.