Speaking with former Trump Administration member and populist right-winger Seve Bannon in an interview, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sounded off on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), accusing them of acting like the secret police in China and Venezuela, or the German Gestapo under the NSDAP. Particularly, he alleged that the FBI is corrupt and no longer follows the laws meant to restrain it.
Speaking about the secret police aspect of how he sees the FBI as acting right now and comparing it to various totalitarian hellholes in which the police are notorious, he said, “They are the Gestapo. We’re in Venezuela. We might as well be in China. We might as well be in Germany during the 30s and 40s. It is corrupt, is the Gestapo.”
Continuing, he accused the FBI as no longer following the law and stopping state AGs like him from fighting back by making them afraid. He said, “They don’t follow any laws anymore. And no one can stop. No one can stop them. And because of what happened to me, these other AG’s are afraid to do anything anyway. So there’s a lot of fear because like, what can you do? How do you stop them?”
He then explained how a president like Trump could fight back against corruption in the FBI, saying that the only effective way forward is to “start over.” In his words: “And I think that the exposure of this case of this judge is unredacted, all this stuff, we’ve got to have more exposure. And then second, we got to have a president will come in, bring in an attorney general that will take these guys out and make sure that the corruption is eliminated and that we start over.”
Then, building on that, he accused the FBI of being “organized crime” of the sort it was originally supposed to combat, saying, “When I heard you say we need to start over, because right now, you know, they were formed. FBI was formed to go after organized crime. And the problem with that now is they are organized crime. They’re paid for by taxpayer dollars. They have become organized crime.”
Steve Bannon, responding, said that Trump needs to change tack and dismantle the “monstrosity” of the FBI, saying, “But do you agree with me that….President Trump, God bless him, he’s setting out for his urban renewal of DC. He’s saying, hey, we’re going to build a big, beautiful headquarters. I said, hey, how about plan B, which we take it, take everybody out of the building, take it apart, slab by slab, because it’s a monstrosity. And then do what the Romans did to Carthage, salt the earth around it. So nothing else was ever built there.”
Then, asking AG Paxton what he would do, Bannon asked, “As an attorney general, the most powerful state in the union, do you believe we have to start at scratch, take their charter away, which, by the way, is not renewed, hasn’t been renewed in decades, but just deauthorize them. Take the charter away. And if we need a federal law enforcement force to work with the states in the state, AGS and the prosecutors and the local attorneys rebuild it, do you agree with that?”
Paxton said that it would be better to have no FBI than the FBI we currently have, telling him, “PAXTON: It would be better to have nothing. Right now everybody’s like, well, what about crime? Well, they’re not there to stop crime anymore. There are political organizations designed to persecute people like you and me. And so it would be better not to have anything there then to have that. So yes, you have to you have to take it to the ground and start over. There’s I don’t know any other way because there’s so much corruption. And it’s been so built up by so many other people for so long.”
Watch that podcast interview here:
Featured image credit: Texas Attorney General’s website
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