Retired FBI agent warns Vivek Ramaswamy to be 'very careful' on the campaign trail

Vivek Ramaswamy was at a campaign stop in Iowa on Thursday and met a retired FBI agent and his wife who said they were supporters. The former agent gave Ramaswamy a warning. 

"I met a former FBI agent and his wife on the campaign trail here in Iowa. They agree with me: we need to root out the corruption & shut down the FBI. At the local level, we have police & prosecutors. At the federal level, we have U.S. marshals & the DOJ. An intermediary bureaucracy is rife with risk for politicized corruption & it’s been happening since J. Edgar Hoover in the 60s," Ramaswamy said on X of the exchange.

Charlie Kirk saw the exhange and asked a different question.

"Is this man warning Vivek he’s in danger because of the FBI?" Kirk asked.

"Jesus, be careful," the man said to Ramaswamy, who assured him that they would be. The man quietly inferred that he was not giving a warning to be politically careful.

"You mean 'be careful' be careful," Ramawamy said. The man nodded. 

"Very careful," he said. He briefly detailed his experience in a counter terrorism unit in the FBI, over two decades, saying "I was a cop before that." 

"You're worried," Ramaswamy asked.

"Yes, I'm worried," he said.

Ramswamy asked "What would you do in my shoes?"

"I’d get some very, very competent help, some very competent people to do intelligence work for you before you went places," the man said.

"I appreciate that. We'll take that seriously, man. We're reading between the lines of what you're saying and we gotcha," Ramaswamy said.

Ramaswamy has said he'd shut down the FBI were he to win the presidency, and that he intends to reduce the federal workforce by 75 percent. He also wants to shut down the IRS, CDC, ATF, DOE and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"The real threat we face in the United States is the rise of that managerial class from our universities to corporate America to the ultimate mother of the managerial class, the administrative state in the federal government," he said in September.

"Today, the people who we elect to run the government are no longer the ones who actually run the government. It is the deep state in the shadow government of those three-letter agencies that wield power today. That is why I've said that as your next president, I will shut down the unconstitutional federal administrative state," he went on.