Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson write:

After serving in the FBI for more than two decades, in 2011 Frank Figliuzzi became the assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, where he worked alongside FBI Director Robert Mueller. Suffice it to say he saw a lot in his career.

So it should be taken seriously that Figliuzzi, now an MSNBC senior national security and intelligence analyst, describes Trump’s picks to run what are sometimes referred to as the power ministries — among them the DOJ (including the FBI) and the defense department — as a “hijacking of the entire national security structure.”

“My chief concern is this single characteristic that seems to run through these nominees — blind allegiance to Donald Trump,” Figliuzzi told us.

We recently connected with Figliuzzi to get his insight on Trump’s picks and what they signal about how the federal government will operate over the next four years. He warned that “we could be heading toward tremendous abuses of power, with the FBI going after Trump’s political enemies.” And he noted that a previous FBI director provided the president-elect and his choice to run the bureau, Kash Patel, with a blueprint.

“J. Edgar Hoover was found in the 1960s and early 1970s to have repeatedly authorized illegal wiretapping and pursuit of perceived enemies — people he didn’t like and people the White House didn’t like,” Figliuzzi said. “Notoriously, the FBI was doing dozens of ‘black bag’ jobs — breaking into people’s homes, planting evidence, seizing evidence, planting microphones.”

“Yes, we could have a repeat of that,” he added. “People say, ‘Oh, this won’t be so bad.’ No, it could get really bad.”

A transcript of Figliuzzi’s conversation with Public Notice’s Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. [Continue reading…]