David Frum

It's the CIA operates by one set of rules.

It's an espionage agency.

It doesn't have to respect civil liberties.

It doesn't have to charge people and send them to prison.

It just needs to know things.

The FBI needs to charge people and send them to prison.

And properly, in a constitutional democracy, you limit the knowledge that a police department has because they can't just go ferreting around everything.

But what do you do with international terrorism where the CIA is gathering information by one set of rules and the FBI needs to operationalize that by another set of rules?

You didn't want to bring the CIA into DHS.

It's not there.

But you needed to create some kind of structure.

for coordinating all the information that was available to the United States government to protect the United States against terror attacks and other catastrophic threats.

So that's the theory.

And the people who were in charge of DHS were supposed to be serious Homeland Security protectors.

And whatever you think about illegal immigration, and I'm probably more hawkish about it than you, it's a threat to the labor market.

It's not a threat to anybody's safety.

And DHS needs to have the mandate of American safety first.

And that means competent, efficient, experienced counterterrorism, counterespionage professionals, not, as I say, the team of bozos.

Well, this again is going to anticipate something you wanted to say for later.

Let's just do it.