Talk show host and former intelligence official Buck Sexton told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday that the people Donald Trump is naming to key positions within the Department of Justice should not simply punt on what happened to the president-elect over the past four years.

The two initially discussed a DOJ inspector general report released earlier in the day that said the FBI placed more than two dozen confidential human sources within the crowd that had gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, to hear a speech by then-President Trump.

The conversation then veered into what FBI director-nominee Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney General-nominee Pam Bondi should do in terms of reforming both agencies if they are confirmed.

“Kash seems to have zeroed in on what exactly needs to be done. This whole Jan 6 day and the investigation that followed put a real scarlet letter on the MAGA movement. Let’s be honest, it was criminalized,” Watters said during the interview.

“If you had a MAGA hat on, you were looked at by the federal government as a domestic terrorist in some quarters. It’s just the way it was. And so going back now, and you realize that they had over two dozen paid rats who had infested these groups, I mean, it sounds like there was an agenda here,” he added before bringing in Sexton.

“I think there absolutely was an agenda at work, and I think everyone also has to remember, it seems like now it’s obvious, but if you were to go back in time, a lot of people that were involved in this kind of activity, they would have assumed that Donald Trump would never be president again,” Sexton began.

“They would assume that certainly he wouldn’t be in a position where he could appoint the kind of people that we’re seeing coming into his administration to get the transparency, to get to the bottom of weaponization of the DOJ, weaponization of the FBI. The lawfare that they have already engaged in, if this were to continue, if this were to perpetuate itself from the left against Republicans, this could bring down the republic,” he continued.

“This is very serious stuff. And Jan 6, as we know, was supposed to be the incident that would keep Trump and the MAGA movement out of power forever. I think they believe that that would be the case,” Sexton said.

“Clearly, based on this last election, it isn’t. And so now it is absolutely incumbent upon the people that are taking over, and we mentioned Kash and others, the new AG, Pam Bondi, to look into everything that was done, that was clearly done for political reasons. And I might add, the people who are saying, oh my gosh, Donald Trump, he’s coming in, this is so terrifying,” he continued.

“Why should anybody at the FBI or DOJ be worried about looking through the files and understanding what happened? If everything they did was legitimate, then it should be fine. But I think when we see what was done to Jan 6 individuals, for example, and we’ve seen a lot of it up to this point, the treatment they received was so much more harsh and extreme than what any reasonable application of the law could have ever been,” said Sexton.

“The people who have been screaming the loudest for all of the Trump years about the threat to our sacred institutions are the ones who, when you take a step back and look at it, whether it’s the Justice Department, Congress, any of it, they’re the ones who have actually done the most damage to these institutions of faith in government,” he said as he wrapped up his remarks.

“They tried to lock up the soon-to-be president. They did lock up some of his supporters, not just J6. I’m talking about senior advisors, people like Peter Navarro, people like Steve Bannon. Bannon had to serve a prison sentence. This is completely insane. They put Navarro in prison. Leg shackles.”