Downplaying DC Chaos
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the game. Secure the cure! Get the Carl's Jr. app, join my rewards, and get the free Carl's Jr. Hangover Burger all day on February 10th. Limit one for my rewards member only at participating restaurants on February 10th while supplies last. Visit carlsjr.com slash freeburgerday for terms. It's Thursday, February 6th, right now on CNN This Morning. I haven't characterized it as chaos in just department after department.

swept up in the chaos, the federal workforce reeling as President Trump and Elon Musk attempt to implement seismic changes to the government. And this: It's a unique offer, you know, one that no other country in the world has stepped up and made an offer. The next day's spin, President Trump's team tries to downplay the stunning proposal to take over Gaza and move the Palestinian people out. And later: Anybody worth their salt could pretty easily get to actual names.

A "counterintelligence disaster." The CIA sent a list of names of its new hires in an unclassified email to the White House. And vital forecasting on the line: the National Weather Service facing cuts. Why that could put millions of lives in danger when the next natural disaster strikes.

All right. It is 6 a.m. here on the East Coast. The Live Look Capitol Hill on this Thursday morning. Good morning, everyone. I'm Casey Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us. Day by day, department by department, President Donald Trump is empowering Elon Musk to slash and burn.

He campaigned across this country with Elon Musk, vowing that Elon was going to head up the Department of Government Efficiency and the two of them, with a great team around them, were going to look at the receipts of this federal government and ensure it's accountable to American taxpayers. That's all that is happening here?

Tonight is the deadline for federal workers to decide about the president's so-called buyout offer. The Trump administration claiming that about 2% of the roughly 2 million federal civilian employees have accepted the buyout offer. Sources tell CNN that after the deadline passes, federal workers will see sweeping layoffs in

It is that slash-and-burn approach that mirrors what happened at Twitter. After he bought the social media platform, Musk cut 80% of employees. CNN spoke with one former senior employee at Twitter who explained Musk's approach this way, quote, Question every requirement. Assume that every requirement that anybody ever gives you is dumb. Question it. Eliminate it wherever possible. I remember him directly saying, quote,

If you're not adding things back in afterward, then you weren't cutting hard enough to start with. It's one thing when the consequences are related to a social media platform and quite another when it's about Americans' health care, Social Security payments, the safety of our planes in the skies. But we'll get to that. Here was how Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief White House strategist, explains it.

These guys come with a Silicon Valley attitude of break things and do it fast. Obviously, there's a different regulatory structure within the government. I think it'll get worked out. I think they're gonna bring to the surface many fights that have been going on that haven't really got public attention. I would just tell you, like in film, you'll fix it in post. You'll fix it in post. Of course, though, there are some things, especially in government, that once they're broken,

They are just that. They are broken. Sources telling CNN that the CIA sent the White House an unclassified email containing the first name and last initial of everyone the agency has hired in the last two years. The email could have exposed the employees' identities to foreign hackers. It was sent to comply with one of President Trump's executive orders. So his vision and Musk's portfolio, of course, only growing. They have...

Let's just tick through a couple of these things that they've done right in the past. I mean, how many? It's not even three weeks. They've gained access to the Treasury's payment system. They are looking at upgrading, quote unquote, the nation's air traffic control system. They want to plug in, I believe was the quote. They've dismantled America's largest foreign aid agency, and they're already planning, helping to plan the end of the education department. They're also, of course, offering those buyouts to all of America's spies at the CIA.

When he was asked whether all of these cuts undermine congressional authority, House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that, well, it's actually all just going according to plan. We see this as an active, engaged, committed executive branch authority doing what the executive branch should do. It looks radical. It's not. I call it stewardship. This is not a usurpation of authority in any way. It's not a power grab. I think they're doing what we've all expected and hoped and asked that they would do.

All right. Our panel's here. Jonah Goldberg is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Dispatch. Alex Thompson, CNN political analyst, national political reporter for Axios. Megan Hayes, Democratic strategist, former director of message planning for the Biden White House. And Matt Gorman, Republican strategist, also advisor formerly to Tim Scott's presidential campaign. Welcome to all of you. Another day in the second Trump administration, Jonah. And it's all coming so quickly. I

I do think that there clearly is some appetite among Americans for trimming government waste. This is something we hear from voters all the time. But the stakes are incredibly high for things like our air traffic control system, you know, the sensitive data of all Americans inside the Treasury Department. They now reportedly have access to Medicare and Medicaid, which includes people's health records.

Is Elon going too far for American voters or is he not? Well, if the question is for American voters, I think the evidence isn't in yet, right? I mean, we just don't, there doesn't seem to be the massive groundswell of popular sentiment. I think you gotta put this in a whole bunch of different buckets, right? I mean, there's the, first of all, is the actual policy aim desirable? In some cases, I'm very much willing to defend the Trump administration on some of these things. And then is the procedure desirable?

constitutional, or wise, right? And those are three different, much more difficult questions to answer sometimes. You don't, I'm all in favor of doing like maintenance on airplanes, but not while they're flying, right? - Yes.

like break, you know, digging into the code for the air traffic control system while all of these planes are still up in the sky and like moment to moment. I mean, yeah, if you move fast and break things, if you break that, like planes fall out of the sky, right? Like the stakes are different. So like the triage questions are like the prudential questions about

what they're doing on one part of government, I may be totally fine with 'cause I think the stakes are low. Another part of government, I think the stakes are high and you don't want it. But also, I mean, the problem with Mike Johnson's position is not only, he's technically right, this isn't a power grab because they're letting them, it's a power giveaway.

Right? And this has been a problem with Congress for a very long time. Both parties have basically said, we want the president to operate as essentially a de facto regent who is going to usurp our power and we're going to let them do whatever they want. And this is that on steroids. Often because they don't have the political guts, which is the polite word, to take on the consequences of their own actions. At this point, they don't even have the institutional memory. Lots of people in Congress don't even know how to legislate anymore.

Yeah. So we do have a little bit, I will say, Jonah, of data coming in on on Musk. It's early days. But Alex Thompson, here's how our our Harry Enten has kind of assessed

Elon Musk's overall favorable rating in the country. So back in 2016, his net favorability rating was 29 points positive. So 29% more people thought favorably of him. It fell in 2024 to something that looks a lot like any of our politicians, quite frankly, 50-50, negative three. It's continued to drop.

to negative 11. There's some economists you go polling that looks at Republicans and that that has gone from November, 47% of Republicans said they wanted Musk to have a lot of influence, 29% said a little. That a lot number has dropped to 26% from 47. So clearly people are reacting to this. Yeah, but he is undissured and that's because he has President Trump's backing. I mean, the fact is that- And half a trillion dollars. Well-

Well, I mean, you spend $200 million and you spent $290 million. Either works. I mean, he basically gave Trump $290 million for his last election. That buys you a lot of leeway with Donald Trump. I'd also say that Doge, it's not...

It is not satisfied. It is expanding. You saw just this week, they've really gone to try to take over this obscure agency, the Government Services Administration, which essentially controls all of the property, all of the computers, all the technology that every single other agency has to use, usually has to go through GSA. And you're seeing that they are trying to take over that agency as well. So they're just ramping up.

A couple things. It doesn't matter what his approval rating is, right? I think in some ways... Oh, it does to Trump, though. If he starts seeing bad polling numbers on Elon Musk, you don't think that's going to have an impact? I totally disagree. Here's why. I think in many ways this is a good cop, bad cop routine. And...

- Elon can be the proverbial undertaker because he's never gonna face, as you said-- - So if his polling numbers go down, Trump's fine with that 'cause Trump's polling numbers will be-- - And he can just get rid of that. - Because Trump is a good cop in this, right? I think we've seen this a little bit when it comes to some of the Gaza and the foreign policy stuff too. But again, I think if Democrats and some in the media wanna be going kind of defending kind of the federal workforce and the bureaucrats

and foreign aid, the Trump administration was kind of feeling out how far they can take this, right? Domestic spending, as we saw with the spending freeze, they kind of hit the electric wire a little bit and backed off. This sort of thing, they feel empowered to, and look,

You know, I think you're seeing a lot of, and you're going to continue to see, you know, talk from these federal government workers. It's, look, buyouts and layoffs are something that almost every other American worker, either they themselves or know somebody who has been through. And government jobs are not lifetime contracts.

So if the idea that Democrats are going to run on these buyouts or layoffs is a political issue, go for it. Well, and to that point, Megan, Politico, Rachel Bade, talked to David Axelrod and to Rahm Emanuel, both of whom, of course, have, you know, their own long histories and kind of ways of looking at the world. But Axelrod told them this, quote, my heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me, man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight.

When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is cut foreign aid. Rahm Emanuel said, quote, you don't fight every fight. You don't swing at every pitch. And my view is while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador, that is not a hill I am going to die on.

So should this be a hill that, I mean, what hills should Democrats die on and which ones should they not? Well, it's interesting because they don't seem to be dying on any hill because they don't seem to be doing much. So they are leaving this up to people on the outside to file lawsuits. I mean, do you see Democrats out there? You saw Chuck Schumer out there like chanting. It's like, what are you doing? There are things you can do in Congress. I mean, Senator Tuberville shut down confirmations for 10 months over an abortion amendment. What are Democrats doing? There's Schumer. More of that. I mean, like, really, what are we doing here? And so you're leaving it out to outside groups to file lawsuits. It's

a lot of this stuff is unconstitutional and should be handled i don't disagree with rob emanuel that you shouldn't die on the usaid hill i think it's just the first one that has like real implications 50 000 people in the united states have lost jobs from the lack of funding for aid so i do there are a lot of things here to continue to pull that and i get it right like it's a cruel fact i don't want anyone in theory to lose their jobs but just in january you had microsoft google stripe

layoffs, this isn't something that is, oh my God, can you believe they're laying people off? This is something that American, regular non-government Americans are acquainted with very well. Well, and for aid, it's not that people are losing their jobs that are government workers. They spend $2 billion on food. So it's people in farms and people in communities in rural and 38 states. I hear what you're saying, but these aren't traditional government employees. So it's different. Jonah, I mean, big picture here. I take the point about layoffs, what people deal with in the private sector.

I just keep coming back to the stakes of cutting the government without really considering how you are doing it. What do you think in particular are the national security implications of how they're going about this? Yeah, so that characterization of Elon Musk's approach from the old Twitter guy where he says, if you're not putting stuff back in, then you didn't cut too far in the first place.

Not sure I want a surgeon who has that philosophy. Oh, shouldn't have taken out that liver. I'll put it back in now, right? And like, and on areas like national security, also, I mean, I'm not saying there's evidence for this yet. We just don't know. But like, there are places where the government touches people. USAID really isn't one of them. But like, Social Security, Medicare, VA reimbursements. I mean, there are places where

like that game operation to stick with the medical metaphor, like there could be one spot where Musk touches and the nose lights up and people are like, what the hell is this guy doing? And that can have a tendency to cause people to retroactively view this whole period differently, right? It's like you judge it by, here's the screw up. Oh my gosh. You look back and you say, this whole thing was a mess, right?

And it could be something to do with national security where somebody gets kidnapped, right? We reveal the sources and methods or something. Or it could be something with entitlements or it could be something with public safety. And presumably they know this, but if their attitude is cut first and fix later, just knowing and actually doing something about it are two different things. Again, the stakes of making a mistake when you are... And I think it's also worth noting as much money as Elon has, as successful as his enterprises have been,

they have not affected nearly so many people as the federal government of the United States can affect with like the touch of a button. All right, coming up here on CNN This Morning, concern about growing risk to national security. We're going to talk more about how an unclassified email may have exposed some of America's spies.

Plus, the new agency on Elon Musk's chopping block, the National Weather Service. What these cuts could mean for those life-saving weather warnings that you rely on. And the White House trying to clarify the president's proposal to, quote, "take over Gaza." Some of the Arab American voters who helped him get elected say they feel betrayed. I mean, it's very concerning and it's infuriating. Palestine is the red line for this community.

I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy. This week on the podcast Terms of Service, we'll hear from a high school senior who gave up her smartphone altogether. People will ask me like, oh, why do you have a flip phone? Everyone thinks it's a punishment. They're like, are you grounded? And I'm like, no, I actually chose this for myself. What are the challenges of committing to a pledge like this? And is it worth it? Follow CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.

Trump wants to take over Greenland, Canada, and now the Gaza Strip. He's like everyone at 2 a.m. drunk ordering off Amazon. I'm going to add Gaza Strip to it, the cart. I want Gaza Strip. As President Donald Trump seems to add another territory to his wish list, allies in his administration are now scrambling to clarify what he really meant when he said that the U.S. would take over Gaza, possibly with the assistance of U.S. troops.

As far as Gaza is concerned, we'll do what is necessary. If it's necessary, we'll do that. We're going to take over that piece. "We'll do what is necessary," he said when asked about potentially using the U.S. military in Gaza. Now members of the Trump administration are trying to clarify why he wouldn't rule out that possibility.

Why not rule out? Because I think the president is very good when he's making deals and negotiating not to rule out anything because he wants to preserve that leverage in negotiations. And so I think that's what he's doing here. Also unclear in the idea from the president is where would the nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians live? Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggests that any displacement would be temporary.

So what he's very generously has offered is the ability of the United States to go in and help with debris removal, help with munitions removal, help with reconstruction, the rebuilding of homes and businesses and things of this nature so that then people can move back in. But the president seemed to throw out a range of possibilities for the future of current Gaza residents when he talked about his idea on Tuesday.

If we can build something for them in one of the countries, and it could be Jordan, and it could be Egypt, it could be other countries, I hope that we could do something where they wouldn't want to go back. Who would want to go back? The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. I think the entire world, representatives from all over the world will be there, and they'll live there. Palestinians also. Palestinians will live there.

Jonah Goldberg, the degree to which that this, we have learned in the last 24 hours about how this wasn't thought through. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman over at the Times, they wrote it this way, right? The presentation from the president left more questions than answers, like how

How would this work? How many US troops would be required to clear out of Hamas and the mountains of rubble and defuse all the unexploded ordnance? What would it cost to rebuild a demolition site the size of Las Vegas? How would seizing Palestinian territory be justified under international law? What would happen to the two million refugees? In the hours after the announcement, senior administration officials were notably short on substantive answers. The reason for their evasiveness soon became clear. No actual details existed.

Details. Look, I want to be real clear. It's an insane idea. Okay? It's...

When Joe Biden, I thought somewhat foolishly, tried to put in that pier to provide aid to Hamas, Hamas fired on it, right? The idea that you're going to be able to do something like this with boots on the ground and not have Americans lose their lives, which is pretty explicitly what J.D. Vance and these guys were saying America is going to be done with, right? I mean, we can go down a long list. It's a pinata. You can hit it from any angle and get some reward. The one thing I will say in defense of all of this is...

as just a giant middle finger to the sort of cliched conventional wisdom about how the Israel-Palestinian conflict works and the process of terrorist attacks on Israel, Israel responds, everyone condemns Israel for responding, and then we need a peace process and aid to flow in to build back up Gaza all over again, and then the cycle repeats. And the whole two-state solution process

What this does is just says, yeah, we're not thinking along those terms anymore. And that's not a bad thing by my way of looking at this stuff. The October 7th attack deserves terrible consequences for Hamas.

And this is part of that package of terrible consequences, even though it is an insanely stupid idea. Well, to add to that point, I mean, the bigger story here is the fact that Donald Trump is basically declaring unequivocal solidarity with Israel, has essentially abandoned talking about any sort of two-state solution for Gaza. And you saw even then Yahoo yesterday throw a little bit of an elbow to Joe Biden and basically say, now there's no daylight between our two

country. And this will keep the crazy right-wing members of Netanyahu's coalition in for another year. So it's a huge political gift on that front. So that was the smile on his face throughout the entire press conference. I don't think Netanyahu wants America to take over Gaza either. But he'll play along. Yeah. All right. Still ahead here on CNN This Morning, FBI leadership being accused of insubordination. It's a showdown brewing with the Justice Department. Plus...

One of the five things you have to see this morning, a runaway boat. How deputies managed to get this under control. All right, it's 28 minutes past the hour. Here are five things you have to see this morning. Watch. Incredible video showing firefighters rescuing a girl from a burning home. They pulled her through a window. Rush her to safety. This happened in San Bernardino, California.

50 protests in 50 states, thousands gathered in front of state capitals across the U.S. yesterday protesting the Trump administration's policies and Elon Musk's expanding role in the White House. A boat spinning out of control in the water in Florida. A rescue team able to get close enough. That's when a rescuer was able to jump onto the boat and get it to the shore. The person on board the boat had a medical emergency.

So who's going to the big game on Sunday? According to some rescued lions, it will be the Kansas City Chiefs. The Wildcat Sanctuary in Minnesota saved them from Ukraine. Let them make their picks based on the goalposts. Yeah, sorry guys. I, well, I honestly am so superstitious that I'm not going to sit here and say that the Eagles are going to win the Super Bowl. It's just not a thing that we do in Philadelphia. Anyway, there's also this. It's a penalty for hogging the water bowl. Smooches.

Cuteness overload. I'll take this. Sneak peek at this year's Puppy Bowl. There are going to be 142 rescue puppies, some special needs players. You can watch the pups battle for the Lombarki Trophy this Sunday. It will be on our sister network, Animal Planet. I personally love this tradition. I don't know about you, Jonah, but Jonah is nodding. All right.

All right, still coming up here on CNN This Morning. Life-saving weather alerts could be on the line. Employees at the National Weather Service could face cuts with President Donald Trump's plan to dramatically reduce the federal workforce. Plus, the intelligence community also facing those cuts. The CIA offered so-called buyouts. It's just like taking a machete to the federal government without a concern for how it impacts our national security.

We got lucky in Florida, very, very lucky indeed. We had actually our original chart was that it was going to be hitting Florida directly. Maybe I could just see that, Kevin. It was going to be hitting directly, and that would have affected a lot of other states. But that was the original chart.

You'll remember the moment from President Trump's first term, now known as Sharpiegate, when he altered a hurricane forecast with a Sharpie. Now America's forecasting agency is being targeted by Elon Musk's Doge. Employees at the National Weather Service and NOAA were sent a so-called buyout email. Their job is to ensure Americans have sufficient time to evacuate in the event of a hurricane or a tornado.

Senator Chris Van Hollen posted to AskX saying Noah is vital and saves lives. He says he and his team will not stand for Musk's cronies to target Noah. Let's get to our meteorologist, Derek Van Dam. Derek, help us understand the implications of this.

Well, Casey, what people need to understand is that the National Weather Service was already grossly understaffed some of the lowest staffing in decades and further cuts to that amount of personnel means the potential for missing life saving and property saving information, which these meteorologists are

are responsible for creating and passing off to our viewers and the general public as well. But remember, these meteorologists, they don't only forecast, they oversee the hardware that's responsible for the forecast. So launching weather balloons that go into our computer modeling,

maintaining the infrastructure as well. Super important for this personnel. So reducing the amount of people that are able to do that means time sensitive information like storm surge, hurricanes, tornadoes could potentially be missed. Think back to the fires in Los Angeles. The meteorologists out of the National Weather Service there were some of the first to warn of the

potential impacts of that strong La Nina and wind event for that particular region. And we've got to think about what's happening with the upcoming tornado season as well this spring and then the hurricane season this summer and into this fall. Without personnel to warn, what are we going to do? And Derek, there seems to be severe weather out there right now.

Yeah, that's right. So the meteorologists who are staffed 24 hours a day at these local agencies are issuing tornado warnings as as we speak. In fact, there's a tornado watch here across parts of Kentucky into West Virginia. All those pink shades of boxes. Those are tornado warnings moving with this line that's associated with a much larger storm system that is currently actually producing a flash flood emergency. This is life saving information that is being relayed by the meteorologists

that jobs are in question right now. Charleston, West Virginia, this area under a flash flood emergency, the larger storm system bringing ice to the mid Atlantic and snow to much of the northeast. So without that personnel, the warnings don't get relayed to the people at home. Casey. All right, Derek Van Dam for us this morning. Derek, thank you very much for that.

All right, let's continue to discuss Donald Trump's makeover of the federal government, but let's focus now on the impact it may have on our national security and our intelligence agencies. The CIA sent a buyout offer to their entire workforce. I guess that's a wrap on the CIA. Let us now bid a fond farewell to some of their finest work.

Not all of the CIA's information has remained redacted, though, because CNN has learned that in order to comply with the president's executive order to shrink the federal workforce, the spy agency has sent the White House an unclassified email listing the names of all employees hired over the last two years.

This does raise serious concerns about whether foreign adversaries could access the list and identify those employees. One former agency officer told my next guest, David Sanger of the New York Times, that the unclassified reporting of the names was a, quote, counterintelligence disaster. Democrats criticizing the move. Apparently, some list, according to public reports of officers at the CIA, was sent to the White House in an unclassified email.

Now, I remember a time, it seems very quaint, when Donald Trump was always talking about Hillary's emails. What about this email? Joining us now, New York Times White House National Security Correspondent David Sanger, who's of course also a CNN political and national security analyst. David, good morning. How big of a screw-up is this? Good morning, Casey.

Well, Casey, when we wrote about this yesterday, my colleague Julian Barnes and I were quite surprised to have heard about what had transpired. To their defense, and it's a pretty thin one, the unclassified email had the first names and the first initial of the last name of the agents and operatives and analysts involved.

So the White House made the case and others that this did not actually reveal their full identities. It sure gave some clues that would be pretty useful combined with other information from social media and etc. And we know that the Chinese and the Russians are particularly adept at combining all sorts of intelligence to put these together.

I guess the question that I would ask, Casey, would be, supposing we had published in the New York Times or you had published on CNN.com a list of names and first initials of the last name of people hired by intelligence agencies in the past two years. What do we think the White House would have been saying?

David, of course, we wouldn't have done that. Right. Right. We would never have done that. But can I just ask sort of on a basic level, can we assume that this is being read by foreign adversaries, that this has been hacked? I don't know for sure, but we do know in this particular case. But what do we know? We know that during the Obama administration that the Russians were in the unclassified White House State Department and Pentagon systems.

We know that the Chinese, through a group called Salt Typhoon that you and I have talked about before, got deeply into the telephone networks of nine major telecom providers and got at the information about how the Justice Department basically taps into the phones of suspected spies online.

drug dealers, so forth, when they have warrants. So their skills here are pretty good, and particularly for getting into unclassified systems. And very briefly, David, the lengths to which the CIA would normally go, not to reveal the actual first name and last initial of, let's stick with the Directorate of Operations, the more kind of sensitive players here,

Normally, how far would they go to make sure, I mean, normally these people operate in the world often under names that are not their actual first names, right?

That's right. And frequently they operate as well under a sort of official cover that, you know, they've got a job and a title at the State Department, at the Agency for International Development, perhaps, at the Agriculture Department. You know, they could be placed in other roles. So it's very possible that

the data could be, you know, cross-registered here. And remember, what did the Chinese steal back during the Obama years? They went into the Office of Personnel Management's database and got all kinds of data about U.S. officials who had security clearances. They did not at that time get into the intelligence agency list because the intelligence agencies kept them separate from what's in the Office of Personnel Management.

But this is obviously the kind of information foreign groups all look for. All right, David Sanger, thank you very much for being on the program, sir. Always appreciate you. See you soon. Great to be with you. All right, still to come here on CNN this morning, some Arab-American voters who supported Donald Trump expressing regret after hearing his plans for nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. Plus, FBI agents under scrutiny. How deep will the president's cuts go?

The FBI just turned over details of 5,000 employees who worked on January 6th cases, leading to fears that they could be terminated by the Trump administration. At this rate, the only federal agents left are gonna be on CBS's "FBI," "FBI Most Wanted," "FBI International," and "FBI True: Real Agents Untold Stories."

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. I remember one of my colleagues saying, after you croak, nobody will ever talk about trauma anymore. Wow. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. He is a founding father of trauma studies. We're going to talk about what treatments are available from dance classes to somatic therapy to cutting edge psychedelic research. And we're going to get really to the heart of this word trauma.

Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts. Here's just some of the agenda we will immediately implement when we become, we, we, we're going to become the 47th president of the United States. I will totally obliterate the deep state. We started, we fired Comey, we got rid of a lot of scum.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP MAKING GOOD ON HIS CAMPAIGN PROMISES TO GO AFTER THE SO-CALLED DEEP STATE. ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI SWORN IN AT THE WHITE HOUSE YESTERDAY WHERE SHE VOWED TO END THE QUOTE WEAPONIZATION OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT.

Part of this effort, apparently, acting Deputy Attorney General Emile Beauvais' request for information on a core team of FBI employees who worked on January 6th investigations. But he said FBI leadership refused to identify that group of employees, prompting Beauvais to accuse FBI leadership of insubordination, according to a memo obtained by CNN.

This comes a week after Bove sent a memo instructing the FBI to provide information on all current and former bureau employees who worked on January 6th investigations at any time. But yesterday, Bove attempted to clarify FBI employees who simply followed orders won't be fired, he said in an email. However, if anyone acted with, quote, corrupt or partisan intent...

they could still face consequences. The former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, rejected that idea that these kinds of agents exist within the bureau at all. The idea that the FBI contains some group of rank and file agents who are radical left leaning partisans who are out there ignoring the directions given to them by their supervisors in order to target Republicans is fantasy. It is a fever dream.

Joining us now is Phil Mudd. He is a former CIA counterterrorism official and former FBI senior intelligence advisor. Phil, good morning. Always grateful to hear from you. You stood up earlier in your career, the FBI's domestic counterterrorism capabilities in the wake of 9-11. You have kind of a deep understanding of the stakes of this kind of action. Can you help us understand what they are?

Well, there's a couple of pieces here. First, the numbers you're talking about, thousands of people, whether you divide that into what the Trump people call partisans or a broader FBI population, that's a substantial portion of the FBI. So if you're looking at national security issues like counterterrorism and counterintelligence, and some of those agents or analysts worked on the case against President Trump and some of his advisors, that's a lot of people. And so that can impact mission, especially in the short to midterm, if you remove those people suddenly from the table.

There is a personal piece here. You can't be sitting around in New York or Washington or elsewhere at the 50-plus FBI offices across the country

and not having to have a cup of coffee saying, "Am I next?" So there's a nervousness about joining the service and saying, "What do I get for my service? Am I gonna be fired?" And then there's the bigger piece about where the thousands of people go. And that affects not just investigations into political corruption, which is a very small piece of the FBI, but also counterintelligence and counterterrorism stuff from agents and analysts who were detailed to work on those Trump investigations. - Yeah.

Phil, can you also talk a little bit about the CIA? Because I know you spent the bulk of your career there. We were just talking to David Sanger about it. But this idea that they're going to offer buyouts across the board, and then there's this email that goes out that potentially exposes the real names of everyone that's been hired in the last two years. What are the implications, and how far does the agency normally go to conceal the information that they just put in an unclassified system?

Boy, you just gave the Chinese a gift. You're going to conceal that stuff, not because a first name and a last initial means a lot to a regular American citizen, but what the Chinese will do and other services will do is take that and combine that with other open source information. Let's be really simple. Let me give you an example. Somebody who identifies themselves as an analyst on Facebook without saying what agency they're with, and they have the same first name and last initial that's on that list.

That's one bit of data you might use if you're the Chinese and they've got a million other bits of data. They're going to try to use this as a phone book. So, I mean, I'm not going to lose sleep over it, but that is an unforced error, as we would say in tennis. I mean, you hit the net with that one because you didn't even try to get it over the net. That's embarrassing and it could be a substantial risk to a person who just joined the agency. In terms of buyouts, let me give you a simple sort of layman's response to that. Good luck with that.

You join the service of the CIA. It's an interesting job. It's not well-paid, but it's interesting. And it's not just a job, it's a mission. You're in Washington, D.C., you're traveling around the world trying to understand what the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans are doing. And somebody comes in and says, here's some chunk change to retire. Good luck with that. I don't think they'll get a lot of success with that. And then the question will be, what's the next step? Are they going to fire people? Try that one, too.

What would be the implication of firing people if, as you say, the CIA employees who are, as you very importantly note, are mission-driven people? What implication does that have for all of us here at home? Well, let me give you a simple example. Let's say they look at employees who were brought on the last couple of years. Those are the easiest employees to remove because they are still under what's called probationary period. They're not full-time. They're not sort of

employees who have gone past that initial stage of vetting once they join the agency. Let's say you eliminate two or three years of recruits. Do you know how hard it is to find somebody to move to Washington, D.C., alone with your family? It's an expensive city. You're not going to make that much money. Let's say you speak some or fluent Mandarin or Russian or Korean. So you move them here for two or three years. You get them through a vetting system and then you eliminate that entire generation of people.

Not only is that really hard to replace, not only will that take a while, but try going onto a college campus in 2027 and saying, hey, why don't you join the CIA if you speak Mandarin? What would you say if you were a graduate student? I'd say get out of here. You can't ensure my professional career. And furthermore, the next administration might can me. I think there's a lot of implications, second order, that people haven't thought through yet. All right. Phil Mudd, always grateful to have you, sir. Thank you so much for being here. I hope to come back.

All right. So let's turn to this. President Donald Trump won the critical swing state of Michigan in November with a significant assist from Arab American voters. He convinced many of them that he would deliver peace and stability to the Palestinian people. Here, though, is what some Michigan voters are now saying after the president announced his plan to take over Gaza.

Many in the community are at a loss for words. Last night was a very rough night for most of us. At the end of the day, as Arab Americans or Muslims, we really didn't have much of a choice. Palestine is the red line for this community. A lot of people are calling me and texting me saying, "Hey, how did your vote work out? How was that third party vote?" I didn't vote for Trump. So

a protest vote. I don't know. I would say it was a targeted vote of conscience to say that the children of Gaza have to mean something. All right. Our panel is back to talk more about this. I mean, Jonah Goldberg, it seems very obvious on its face, as angry as people in Michigan were about Joe Biden, that President Trump was not going to be someone that was going to do the things that were going to make them happier about the situation. I mean, that said, I mean, this is kind of

the farthest you could go almost, right? Other than saying that you're going to forcibly remove 2 million people, which I guess it's still a question. Like, maybe that is on the table. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, like, I thought the whole turning the Palestinian issue among those voters into the decisive question of that election was foolish, regardless of how you think about it. It also didn't matter, ultimately. Like, they thought they had a lot more leverage. But Trump won all the swing states, right? So it was...

It was basically just performative on the whole, and I understand why they're so incredibly frustrated. At the same time, there are lots of people who voted for things that they didn't see pan out the way they would like, so we'll see, you know? Matt, I mean, for voters like this, I mean, for people in the U.S. who have, you know, and who are watching this kind of horrified, I mean, what is it...

I guess maybe what it says is something about Donald Trump's ability to convince people that he's not gonna do what he says he's gonna do. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. - I would put it a little differently. I think for years, a constituency of the Democratic Party had almost expected folks to kind of fall in line. African American voters for a long time were this sort of thing until Trump came along in '24 and really courted them. I think this was something where

Democrats, and I don't wanna speak for Meghan, but from the outside, it seemed like these guys, they expected this kind of like, what are you gonna do? You gonna vote for Donald Trump? Or are you gonna vote for a third party? And almost didn't expect him to go that far. And there wasn't a courting there. It was, you're gonna really vote for him?

And they didn't. And I think they're now dealing with the consequences of it. Yeah, elections have consequences. I think this is the best thing that you can see. Your vote matters and elections do have consequences. I don't understand. I think the thing that was really impactful in the 24 election is it's not just the protests that were happening and the people who are out there who did not vote for him. It was the narrative for so long that drove the narrative that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had to fight back.

Again, I actually think it impacted them. It changed the way the youth voted. It wasn't just these people in Michigan. There was a lot of people impacted by this. So I do think it was quite impactful, but elections have consequences. October 7th really changed the debate in so many ways that we're seeing now and certainly the election. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. I'm going to leave you with this because we're just days away from Super Bowl 59, where, of course, the Kansas City Chiefs set to face off against my Eagles, setting up a

A rematch of sorts for the brothers Kelsey. Travis, of course, currently plays for the Chiefs and Jason is a former Eagle. Travis, of course, hard at work preparing for Sunday's game, but Jason was front and center in his own kind of competition this week. We've been seeing so many of these, but I loved this one.

A lookalike contest, People Magazine reporting. Ten Eagles fans were sent searching for Jason Kelsey in a crowd of lookalikes. What was his takeaway? According to People, he said, quote, it went fantastic. The lookalikes really looked alike. Not that I'm a particularly hard person to look like, he joked. He did mention that, like, you have to have the eyebrows, you know, to look like him, which I was entertained by. Now that Jason Kelsey's off the field, though, the big question is, who's he going to be rooting for on Sunday? Hmm?

I'm rooting for Philadelphia, and I'm rooting for Travis Kelsey. That's the reality of it. You can see the eyebrows there. Anyway, the choice not so easy for Jason Kelsey's wife, Kylie Kelsey. I have so much respect for this woman. She is a diehard Eagles fan. She even refused to wear Chiefs red at last year's Super Bowl. She did wear red, but it was for the University of Cincinnati. Hmm.

Anyway, there you have it, guys. I have to say, go birds. Thanks to all of you for being here. Thanks to all of you for joining us. I'm Casey Hunt. Don't go anywhere. CNN News Central starts right now.