Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) has been ruled out of the contenders for President-elect Donald Trump’s FBI pick.
“Just spoke to President Trump regarding Mike Rogers going to the FBI,” Trump adviser Dan Scavino wrote on social media. “It’s not happening — In his own words, ‘I have never even given it a thought.’ Not happening.”
The announcement was celebrated by conservatives, who have considered Rogers to be a member of the DC Swamp.
Rogers, a former FBI agent who chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015, once asserted that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and acted as a “clear and present danger to our democracy.”
In 2018, Rogers told NPR that the Nunes Memo should not be released publically. The Nunes Memo criticized the FBI for exhibiting biased sources in its Russia investigation against Trump, The National Pulse reported.
Rogers said at the time, “[R]eleasing it at the angst of all of the intelligence community and the FBI, I argue, is probably not the best way for the public to figure out what in the heck is going on.” He added that the memo would be best handled in a “classified setting.”
Conservatives have called for Kash Patel to be FBI Director.
Patel, who was involved in the National Security Council and Defense Department during Trump’s first term, has criticized the number of “deep state” members present in the department.
“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state, and I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals,” Patel recently said. “Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops.”
