Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said Sunday that President-elect Trump’s picks for his next administration have “got to get their background checks together.”
Earlier in an interview, Klobuchar told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that as a Senate Judiciary Committee member, she and her colleagues on the panel have a role “to look at the FBI background check and is to ask them questions to make sure they’re fulfilling the mission of the department” for Cabinet picks.
“In this case, I am concerned with all these nominees … if we do not have an agreement for FBI background checks,” Klobuchar added in her “This Week” appearance. “As far as I know, the transition committee has not made that agreement yet.”
Some Trump advisers have proposed that the president-elect should move the task of conducting background checks on high-level nominees from the FBI to private investigators.
“They’ve gotta get their background checks together,” Klobuchar said of Trump’s team. “They’ve gotta get qualified nominees, and then we’re interested in doing the work of the American people.”
Some GOP Senators have been pushing back against the Trump advisers’ proposal to not have the background checks conducted by the FBI.
“The FBI should do the background checks, in my judgement,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) previously said.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) has also previously said that the FBI’s access when it comes to information gathered by law enforcement on local, state and federal levels is better than that of private firms.
“If you wanted to supplement it with a private firm, I’d say OK. But the FBI does have access to information that probably a private firm wouldn’t have, even a really good savvy one,” he said.
Klobuchar said in her “This Week” appearance she wishes the Trump team “will put in qualified nominees and we will get these background checks and we will move forward and we will not have brouhahas over people like Matt Gaetz that shouldn’t have been nominated in the first place.”
The Hill has reached out to a contact for Gaetz and the Trump transition team for comment.