Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was a guest on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily, where SiriusXM host Matt Boyle asked him to give President-elect Donald Trump some advice on “draining the swamp” of D.C. corruption.
“Well, one of the things he must understand is, he should realize virtually everyone here in Washington is a park ranger for the swamp, who works to protect it, and won’t really want to drain it at all,” Fitton quipped. “He has to eliminate the park rangers. He has to make sure the government is smaller. He has to make sure there’s less opportunity for corruption because with Big government comes big corruption.”
“It’s not enough to pass ethics restrictions and lobbying restrictions,” Fitton continued. “You have to cut the size of government. That will have the most substantive impact on curtailing corruption in Washington. And then, of course, he has the issue with Hillary Clinton, and that’s not a decision he needs to make directly, but I would hope his Justice Department pursues the Clinton scandals and lets the rule of law rule there, as opposed to politics, which has suppressed the investigations to date.”
Fitton said that politics was still “intruding on the process” of investigating Clinton.
“You have a politicized Justice Department refusing to let the FBI do what it wants to do, at least reportedly, on the Clinton Foundation. You had Comey and the Justice Department rig the Clinton email investigation, as it relates to national security. What the new Justice Department needs to do is to just let things proceed normally, as they would in any other case, and don’t let politics intrude,” he urged.
“The temptation from the Washington establishment is to say, ‘Let bygones be bygones. Hillary Clinton lost, so it’s not fair to prosecute her or investigate her.’ I think the response needs to be: We need to let the law proceed. We need to let regular order prevail, as the Republicans like to say on the Hill,” Fitton said.
“Certainly, Attorney General Sessions should get out of the way of the FBI investigation and provide this proper support a Justice Department would provide, where you do subpoenas. You do grand juries. You bring witnesses in. You do a serious investigation. We know what a serious criminal investigation looks like, and we hope to see that from the Trump administration,” he said.
“It’s not just about Hillary Clinton, Matt. It’s not just a Clinton scandal. It’s an Obama scandal. It’s an FBI scandal. It’s a Justice Department scandal. State Department scandal. It’s a corporate influence scandal. It’s an illegal foreign influence scandal. It really gets to the heart of the way the system’s been corrupted. To ignore it – to me, it doesn’t require much in the way of political juice to cut taxes or even repeal Obamacare. If this type of investigation, and the willingness to let it go forward – that’s where all of the political leadership and influence needs to be brought to bear, in the sense of protecting it from those who would derail such an investigation,” Fitton said.
He said a special prosecutor “might be appropriate” for the Clinton case, given “the failures of the Justice Department and the FBI and maybe the compromise of those agencies in terms of investigating the Clinton scandal.”
“And, of course, Mr. Trump has said he wanted to throw Hillary Clinton in jail,” Fitton recalled. “So his attorney general might have a tough time convincing people he’d be disinterested. A special prosecutor might be appropriate in that regard.”
“The regulations allow for the appointment of a special prosecutor by Attorney General Sessions – assuming he becomes the attorney general – so that’s a decision for him to make,” he noted.
Fitton recommended another vital step for Trump’s swamp-draining project: “There has to be a significant cut to D.C. bureaucracy.”
“The jobs won’t be there for political appointees and recently hired politicized bureaucrats to have any more,” he said of the “park rangers” he had spotlighted earlier. “It’s just a matter of curtailing the bureaucracy. That means cutting it. The first thing they need to do is realize that the bureaucracy is not their friend. It is the enemy. Not necessarily Republican administrations, but of anyone who’s an effective conservative, who wants to reform the agencies.”
“That’s one of the lessons of the Bush administration, how the bureaucracy turned on Bush and tried to destroy him and certainly his appointees, some of whom were effective. So recognizing that the bureaucracies will not be friendly to any reform effort is essential because if you think you’re gonna go in and appoint 50 or 60 officials in an agency and expect the tens of thousands of bureaucrats just to march in lockstep, it’s a buzzsaw you’ll be running into,” Fitton warned.
He said his biggest concern about the Trump transition is that there could be “too much focus on the policy agenda that Republicans have been pushing for the last several years.”
“I think when the President-elect is thinking of appointments, he needs to be thinking of people who can go into agencies and clean house,” Fitton explained. “It’s not just a matter of affecting policy. It’s uncovering and rooting out and destroying the corruption that’s been endemic and growing in the agencies for years. He needs people like that.”
“I don’t know if Giuliani’s the person who’s right for the State Department – boy, but a prosecutor certainly would be right to head the State Department, given its corruption,” he said by way of example. “Thinking outside the box in that regard, that it’s not necessarily a policy expert, but someone who is a hard charger and can clean up the agency.”
“The policy isn’t the issue at this point. We can change the policies, but if the system is still corrupt, his presidency will be for naught. I hope he understands that as he makes appointments, and that’s his plan,” Fitton said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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