Laurel Duggan
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said he plans to strengthen oversight of the FBI if Republicans take back the Senate in November during an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Hawley laid out his concerns about Attorney General Merrick Garland, the FBI and other priorities he believes the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is a member, should focus on prior to his Monday speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, Florida. He said the Homeland Security Committee, of which he is also a member, should focus on pushing the Biden administration to enforce immigration laws and secure the border.
“We need to conduct real oversight of the Department of Justice. There has been no oversight of this DOJ, and that includes the FBI, which is obviously completely out of control,” he said. “Just look at the recent raid of Mar-a-Lago. This is just the latest instance — this is an FBI that called parents domestic terrorists.”
The Biden Administration won’t lift a finger to stop the crime spree Biden’s policies have caused, but they have all the time in the world to target their political opponents pic.twitter.com/4maZC7ePhC
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 9, 2022
The DOJ drew intense backlash from Republicans over its recent raid on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, which Hawley and others viewed as a weaponization of the DOJ and FBI against the administration’s political opponents. Other have argued that the DOJ is going after Trump and targeting of parents who protested Critical Race Theory and sex and gender related curriculums at school board meetings while failing to meaningfully address threats facing conservative Supreme Court justices, given the attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh.
Hawley also reiterated his call for Garland to be impeached, calling him unfit for office and one of the worst attorneys general the country has ever seen.
“[Garland] should have been gone a long time ago,” he told the DCNF. “Anybody who can, with a straight face, preside over a DOJ that is treating parents as domestic terrorists, is not fit for office … he has, I believe, actively misled Congress over and over again in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee and other committees on numerous occasions.”
Hawley said Republicans need to focus on immigration enforcement through the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration law. Migrants have illegally flowed into the U.S. in record numbers since President Joe Biden took office, with 3,463,430 people encountered at the southern border between January 2021 and August 2022, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“We’re gonna have to think about what we can do to get this administration to actually enforce the law at the border,” he said, mentioning his seat on the Homeland Security Committee, which he also said needed to focus on immigration enforcement.
The DOJ and Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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