Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann on Wednesday warned how Donald Trump’s reported work to purge his second administration of non-loyalists could end up going seriously sideways for the president.
It’s “so dumb” as a policy, Weissmann told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
At least 20 senior Justice Department officials have been reassigned since Trump reentered office, as part of the president’s bid to remake the government entirely in his image.
And while Trump and his allies may believe they are thwarting the so-called “deep state” that they allege works against the president, said Weissmann, he warned that’s actually a “complete misread that is projecting onto the Department of Justice what you may be thinking, which is that you are all about transaction and politics and power and money.”
The “big picture,” said Weissmann, is that these moves will likely make the department “dramatically less effective” even in combating the issues that Trump has highlighted for his second term.
“Do you want to counter drug gangs, fentanyl gangs, terrorism, organized crime, child predators? These are the people you need,” Weissmann said. “And so you are now absolutely sort of pulling the most talented people from that mission.”
Those groups “need to be targeted” regardless of who is in power, said Weissmann. “There will be another Katrina. There will be terrorism events.”
“I was trying to think of a word that’s fancier and more erudite but it’s so dumb as a policy to do this,” he added. “I mean, I hate to be sort of coarse in the language, but it just makes no sense at all and I think it has to come from either, you just don’t want the institution to work, or from a really misguided notion of what is animating these people.”