Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Sunday that President Trump’s purge of the FBI is “incredibly dangerous” to national security.
In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Christie described the lengthy process of onboarding FBI agents and said the country cannot afford to lose good agents.
“Understand how long it takes to get a new FBI agent on board. If you fire hundreds — if not thousands, and it would be thousands on this list of FBI agents — it takes 12 to 18 months to get them on board. By the time you go through the interviewing process, the vetting process, then they go to Quantico for their training, and then become onboarded as a brand new FBI agent,” Christie said.
“In the threat assessment we have right now across the world, to lose that many agents, and then take a year to a year-and-a-half to try to replace them, is incredibly dangerous for our national security,” Christie continued. “And for what? Because they did their jobs.”
The interview came after the Trump administration forced out a number of FBI officials Friday, removing agents who worked on Trump’s criminal cases as well as the heads of various field offices.
A source familiar told The Hill that agents who had worked on the Mar-a-Lago and Jan. 6 investigations were escorted out of the Washington Field Office and that officials in charge of the Washington, D.C., Miami, Seattle, New Orleans and Las Vegas field offices were removed.
The Hill reported earlier Friday that the five executive assistant directors of the bureau were notified they would be demoted. That move targeted the band of top officials who oversee the FBI’s five internal branches and are among the highest-ranking career positions in the bureau.
The removals follow a similar purge at the Justice Department, where prosecutors who worked on Trump’s two federal criminal investigations were also fired.
The attorneys were told specifically that they were removed due to their work on the cases, blaming the Biden administration for a “systemic campaign against its perceived political opponents.”
Christie, a former prosecutor, said he’s hearing from sources around the FBI that “they are stunned by what’s happening.”
Christie noted that the FBI agents who worked on Trump’s criminal cases are civil servants, not political appointees.
“None of these agents who worked on the January 6th cases volunteered. That’s not the way it works,” Christie said. “In fact, at the FBI, they do the opposite. They don’t want you volunteering and self-selecting for an investigation because that may mean you bring some bias to it. You go and you select these people.”
“So they were instructed by their bosses to work on the January 6th cases, and what happened as a result of that? Hundreds of convictions in front of juries, in front of judges that were appointed by both Republican and Democratic administrations,” Christe said.
“And so if the president wants to pardon those people, that’s his right to do, but it’s not then his right to fire these folks,” Christie added.
Christie, a former Trump ally, has become one of the president’s most vocal GOP critics in recent years, especially during the 2024 presidential election season, when they both sought the GOP nomination.
