Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said she would gut federal law enforcement agencies and remove problematic officials who politicize and weaponize those agencies if elected to the White House.
Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made the remarks on Friday during The Family Leadership Summit in Iowa with Tucker Carlson.
Carlson grilled the candidates that went before her, including Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, and former Vice President Mike Pence.
With Haley, Carlson did not press her on foreign policy issues such as the war in Ukraine, but did ask Haley her thoughts on federal agencies that were involved in various ways in “shaping public opinion about the last election.”
“You know, when I was governor, I went and replaced the heads of every agency,” Haley said. “It’s the first thing I did when I came to office, it’s the first thing a president should do. You control what you can control. You start with your agencies.”
“So I replaced the heads of every agency,” she continued. “I made sure they were people, some didn’t vote for me, but they were people who knew that sector. So if it was veterans, it was someone who knew the challenges of veterans. If it was tourism, it was someone who knew heads and beds, people on golf courses, they knew what they needed to do. And I did that across the board.”
Haley said that the other thing that she did was she put people teams inside agencies to clear out “problem children” and fix problems.
“In some cases, we had to tweak agencies and other cases we had to gut agencies,” she said. “If you look at — the American people don’t trust our intelligence agencies. They don’t trust our Department of Justice. So you can’t just replace the person at the top. You’ve got to go through and really look at gutting those agencies and getting out a lot of that senior management and things that happen.”
WATCH:
Tucker asks Nikki Haley about federal agencies interfering in elections: "When I was Governor I went and replaced the heads of every agency. The American people don't trust our intelligence agencies, so you can't just replace the person at the top. You've got to go through and… pic.twitter.com/v7WQf0Bohb
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) July 14, 2023