As a candidate for the presidency, Ron DeSantis proposes to expand executive branch law enforcement powers, and hold the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice "accountable" to the White House.
"And then at the executive level, every Republican President in recent times, including Trump, has accepted this idea that agencies like the DOJ and FBI are 'independent agencies,' you can't mess with them, you can't do anything," DeSantis fumed in Ankeny on Tuesday.
"Well, excuse me, that means they're not accountable to anybody. Every source of power needs to be accountable to somebody that's elected by you," DeSantis counseled. "And if they're not, if they're not accountable to the elected president of the United States, that means they can do whatever they want."
"Why would you want to have the agencies that can put people in jail to not be accountable? It makes no sense. So we're going to hold them accountable, we're going to be involved."
DeSantis has made this case before in Iowa, saying the idea that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are "independent agencies" is just a "canard" that allows them to be unaccountable to the Executive Branch.
DeSantis said "part of the reason you've seen these agencies weaponized is because they haven't been held accountable by anybody for many, many decades."
"There's this canard in Washington that they're 'independent agencies', that the President's not allowed to be involved in DOJ or FBI. That's politicizing justice is what they say," the Governor griped. "Well, let me tell you this, if you're not allowed to be involved, if they're independent, that's another way of saying they're unaccountable to anybody."
DeSantis claimed that "The Founders understood" that if power is allowed to "accumulate," then those agencies would naturally "abuse their power."
"And these agencies are in Washington DC. It's toxic," DeSantis argued. "It's a political environment, left of the left, DC is the most Democrat jurisdiction in the entire United States of America, more Democrat than San Francisco even. And that bleeds into everything that these agencies are doing."
DeSantis said he might move the FBI Civil Rights division to "Oklahoma" or "Arkansas" in seeming response to that registration imbalance.
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