A Red-Alert for Democracy: The Patel FBI Purge Begins

It’s certainly not my intention for this column to be daily, but — well — there’s a lot going on right now.

Yesterday, FBI director nominee Kash Patel spent hours before the Senate judiciary committee for his confirmation hearing, facing tough questioning from rightly skeptical Democratic senators and wildly slobbering embraces from the GOP.

The confirmation hearing was a sickening spectacle, a sham of a hearing where either Kash Patel was lying in many answers or is incredibly stupid and incurious—and, while there are many (at least five!) reasons to criticize Patel, no one thinks he’s stupid or incurious.

Repeatedly, Patel—who has personally embraced all manner of conspiracies and far-right cause célèbres as part of his years as the ultimate MAGA loyaltist—appeared naive about the leading far-right extremists he’s associated with repeatedly in recent years. He said he didn’t know conspiracist Stew Peters, only for Sen. Dick Durbin to point out that Patel had done Peters’ podcast eight times. As Durbin said, “Kash Patel has a history of associating with extremist figures who have well-documented histories of racist, antisemitic, and conspiratorial statements and beliefs. This lack of judgment is very concerning for someone who hopes to be our nation’s top law enforcement officer.”

Patel also danced around the times he’s refused to cooperate with federal and congressional investigations, behavior that should itself be disqualifying for anyone seeking to lead the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.

At another point, Patel, under questioning from Sen. Adam Schiff about the so-called “January 6^th anthem,” a song lionizing the violence of the Capitol insurrection and celebrating those who participated, denied his own role and agency in popularizing the song, saying his repeated references to “we” in talking about the song’s creation and recording didn’t include himself. As Schiff said, “Here's what you told Steve Bannon on his podcast: ‘So, what we thought would be cool is if we captured that audio and then, of course, had the greatest president, President Donald J. Trump, recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we went to a studio and recorded it, mastered it, digitized it, and put it out as a song.’” Patel said “we” didn’t necessarily mean him personally.

My Vermont senator Peter Welch even tried to get him to say whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election and he refused, repeatedly. “Can you say the words ‘Joe Biden won the 2020 election’?” Welch said.

All Patel could muster was: “Joe Biden was the president of the United States.”

In turn, the GOP senators warmly embraced him and circled the wagons around Patel; any doubt going into yesterday that he might not get the four GOP votes he needs to be confirmed appeared to evaporate by the end of the day.

Time and time again, he danced around questions about his retribution agenda, denied that the list of 30 people he published in a book last as deserving of political retribution was an “enemies list,” and offered vague promises that he’d look forward, not backward, as FBI director and wouldn’t politicize the FBI. “There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI should I be confirmed as FBI director,” he said.

And yet even as the hearing unfolded, the purge at the Hoover Building evidently began. CNN broke word around 4 pm yesterday that the senior career ranks of the bureau — ranks that have never in modern history been subject to political pressure or replacement when new administrations begin — were being told they would be demoted, reassigned, or fired. These ranks, which I mentioned in my run-down of the Hoover Building’s many-layered bureaucracies are what’s known as the Executive Assistant Directors and lead the bureau’s six major “branches” that oversee its various divisions—branches like National Security (counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and WMD), Intelligence, Cyber and Criminal, and Science and Technology (the FBI Lab, among other divisions). 

These EADs and the special-agents-in-charge also apparently affected, the men and women who lead the bureau’s field offices, are not political actors; they’re career agents, people who have spent decades specifically coloring inside the lines of the FBI’s bureaucracy, people who live and breathe its independence and values of fidelity, bravery, and integrity. To see them cashiered in the opening stages of this purge is terrifying—and will be chilling for anyone else who remains and hopes to make a career in the FBI’s ranks.

To make this point more sharply: The FBI in modern history has never even had a political appointee even as its deputy director—the #2 position—and yet even before Kash Patel has taken over, the Trump administration’s purge of the bureau is reaching down into its fourth, fifth, and sixth ranks of executives. That is chilling and only heightens concern about what will come.

(The one amusing note of the Trump administration’s purge of the FBI came from the Wall Street Journal this week, which uncovered that the Trump White House, never known for competence, misnamed on the website the person they had intended to appoint as acting FBI director and instead of correcting it, simply made the intended acting director and acting deputy director switch roles.)

These moves follow other firings of career Justice Department lawyers who worked on the various (numerous!) investigations of Donald Trump, another unprecedented move.

As CNN warned, agents up and down the ranks fear for their own careers now:

Word also came in the hearing yesterday, in questioning from Sen. Cory Booker, that it appears the Trump administration is trying to install a group of five or more people as, effectively, a political shop in the FBI — creating a KGB-style political commissar in a bureau that for more than a century has studiously avoided active partisan politics.

Where that moves gets extra squirrelly is even though Booker named the individuals likely headed to this team — and one of them, former FBI agent and Jim Jordan aide Tom Ferguson lists his LinkedIn profile as “Trump-Vance Administration, Senior Policy Advisor, Director’s Advisory Team, Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters” — Patel disavowed any knowledge of it.

So we’re left with a question where none of the answers are good: Was Patel lying or is he such a pasty and figurehead that the Trump White House is installing a new political structure without even speaking with him, knowing he won’t object and will welcome extra political minders and allies installed by the White House? 

It’s disheartening, as someone who cares about the FBI as an institution and its place in American life and government, to see someone as inexperienced, partisan, and dangerous cruising toward confirmation by the Republican senate.

As I’ve written this week already — in my columns about the midair collision and the future danger of Patel leading the FBI — government works until it doesn’t. We as a nation, in a lot of ways we don’t think about day to day, rely on the FBI to do its job day-in and day-out, without fear or favor, to protect our civic life, government institutions, prevent terror plots, and round up spies and other violent criminals.

Simply put: Among all the organs of the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, the FBI is the agency of the federal government most central to protecting and defending the very fabric of American life at home.

There aren’t in the end that many men and women who make up the FBI. The entire national agent corps — across headquarters, 55 field offices, 400 regional offices, as well 60-plus Legal Attaches countries overseas — is only slightly more than a third of the size of the NYPD’s uniformed ranks. There are five times more TSA officers working airport security screening than there are FBI special agents in the whole country. The bureau’s senior leadership team, depending on how you count, is probably barely 100 people. In two weeks, we’ve seen a sizable chunk of that already cashiered.

Any one of those 100 could walk out the door tomorrow and double, triple, or quadruple their salary in a private sector security role—they’re in their positions today solely because they believe in public service and the bureau’s mission. A mass exodus ahead, if it comes voluntarily or involuntarily, will set back the FBI for decades expertise-wise and undermine our security and safety as Americans.

I wish I could say I could believe the performance and promises that Patel made in his confirmation hearing, but — as a trained FBI investigator might point out — every piece of evidence we have about him, his background, and the White House’s treatment of the bureau in the last two weeks, says it was one long bald-faced lie.

This should be a four-alarm red alert for democracy, but unfortunately amid the “flood-the-zone” shitstorm of the first two weeks of the Trump administration (Look over here: It’s a horrifying story about Elon Musk forcing out the career civil servant who had been acting treasury secretary in order to get access to the government’s literal checking account?!?!), the unraveling and destruction of the nation’s most critically independent and nonpartisan institution — an institution that the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches have all spent fifty years trying to build safeguards around both its independence and oversight — appears to not even register as front-page news.

As someone else famously wrote last year, worrying about the power that would be handed to a future President Trump, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

GMG

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