Andrew McCabe: Trump Is Trying to Take the Department of Justice to Pre-1970s Days

EXCERPT:

McCABE: "Kate, you know, I think we've got to stop thinking about these things in terms of being unprecedented or unusual. They are clearly that, but they are much more than that. This is — this is damaging to the Department Justice and can undermine its ability to do justice in criminal cases for the United States of America. These -- you know, our DoJ functions in ways that we just take for granted. In this post-Watergate era when we have civil service protections for prosecutors, we have, over those decades and decades, cultivated a group of entirely professional, apolitical experts who can — who spend their time not working for high-paying law firms, but rather prosecuting crimes, national security matters, drug matters, human trafficking, sex against children, all sorts of heinous crimes, and they are protected in their jobs because they simply follow the law and the facts where they are required to go. This is a complete undermining of that system and essentially a return to those pre-1970s days where government jobs were filled by political hacks who simply did the will of the administration. That‘s clearly where the Trump Administration is trying to take the Department of Justice."