I was of the understanding that he had been in for 4 days, not that an extra 72 hours means much.
Freeh's people were all still in place. Freeh's procedures were in place. Freeh's restrictions (held over from the Clinton administration) were in place.
Why, why, and why? Bush was in office for 7 months; why did he allow Louis Freeh to stay in his job for as long as he did? As president, Bush had the power to instruct the "leadership" within the FBI (first Freeh and then the interim director) to clear out all the Clinton appointees and put in people who could be trusted. He didn't do that. And from what I heard from Mueller yesterday, it doesn't sound like he's going to do any purging of these idiots even now.
...This idea being, though, that in the wake of the Clinton administration you would have looked at the situation of American national security -- and many people did, including myself -- and you saw tremendous holes in America`s national security, a neglect of our human intelligence gathering capabilities, a failure to have a coherent response to the terrorist attacks that have been brought against us, and a sense that something really needed to be done in order to correct those holes.The one question that I think does hang in the air is not the silly questions the media is trying to air. What did he know? When did he know it? And all these phony suggestions that this president wouldn`t do his absolute best in response to a particular threat. Of course he would.
But that`s not the overall point. The point is, in the face of the existence of a terrorist network, real threats, actual circumstances in which they had attacked us during the Clinton years and there had not been a sufficient response to build up American strength, why wasn`t there a sense of urgency about developing our overall response and correcting the weaknesses in our national security shield, the kind of urgency, by the way, that did characterize the Reagan administration response when they came in following Jimmy Carter`s similar dismantling of America`s strength in the national security area.
And this does make a difference, by the way, the sense of urgency and priority within an administration can then call forth a response from the bureaucracy, including the intelligence bureaucracy, that is going to bring forward some of the information that might be in the system but that wasn`t served up in a timely way before September 11. ...