An Obituary for the FBI

The 117-year-old Federal Bureau of Investigation, long heralded as the nation’s premier national law enforcement agency — an avowedly nonpartisan, independent investigator that for decades has pursued gangsters, mafioso, Nazis, terrorists, spies, cybercriminals, and corrupt politicians without fear, favor or political malice — died over the weekend.

While the institution’s independence had been on life support since January 30^th, when the bureau’s top career agents were purged in an unprecedented move and the Justice Department announced it wanted the identities of thousands of agents and personnel who contributed to the investigation of the attempted insurrection on January 6^th, the final cause of death was the avarice and cowardliness of 51 Republican senators who voted to confirm Kash Patel as its ninth director — 51 senators too afraid to stand up to Donald Trump, too intellectually rotted by years of MAGA talking points that transformed the bureau into a Deep State bete noire, and too incurious and vengeful to understand the cost of their actions to the country.

The Sunday night announcement that Dan Bongino — a bombastic MAGA podcast host, fiery right-wing troll, one-time Secret Service agent, and three-time failed Republican congressional candidate — would be the new FBI deputy director and join the newly confirmed director Kash Patel, another MAGA loyalist better known for his hucksterism of Trump merchandise than his management, leadership, or law enforcement experience, and lead the FBI marked an almost certainly permanent alteration of the fabric of the institution.

In the entire modern history of the bureau, the deputy director — the #2 person who serves as the day-to-day operational leader of the FBI — has always been a civil servant and career special agent, one who has worked his (they’ve always been men) way up the ranks over a two-decade career and is deeply familiar with the workings of the bureau, its wide-ranging missions, and curious culture.

All previous modern directors, meanwhile, have had deep experience with the FBI — working in senior roles in law enforcement, atop the Justice Department, or as federal judges. Patel and Bongino, who does not require Senate confirmation in the role, bring none of that acquired expertise or wisdom to the role; neither has worked for the FBI for a single day and neither has meaningful senior management experience.

Both have been installed, effectively, to troll the libs — and, more dangerously for every American, to weaponize the normally fiercely independent bureau in service to Donald Trump personally. Don’t take my word for it — Bongino said it himself in 2018: “My entire life right now is about owning the libs." He added then: “We win, you lose, the new rules are in effect.” Or try this video:

More recently, he said this on his podcast: “What matters? Anyone? Power.” Listen to that clip, watch the glee on his face as he says, and imagine him as the second most-powerful person in a vital national law enforcement agency that holds enormous sway over Americans of all stripes, and tell me that isn’t one of the darkest things you’ve seen yet out of the Trump administration.

[[SIDE NOTE: Take the time to read this 2021 profile by my friend Evan Osnos, the brilliant New Yorker writer, of Bongino and his new life’s mission.]]

Normally the FBI director is the only political appointment in the entire bureau, but even as Patel’s was in the seat for his Senate confirmation hearing in January, the Trump administration moved to fire the entire third and fourth layers of FBI management, the associate deputy director and the leaders of its major branches, known as executive assistant directors. Again, these are all career civil service positions filled traditionally by veteran special agents.

Patel has promised in the past that he would close the FBI headquarters “on day one” and turn it into a museum for the Deep State, and Friday, as he assumed the director’s role, an announcement went out that he intended to transfer out some 1,500 of headquarters agents and staff to field offices and satellite offices. Given the administration’s growing track record of capricious, ill-conceived, and ill-executed firings and mass transfers, this move should send shivers down the spine of every American.

It's not just that Kash Patel is monumentally unqualified for his role — it’s that he has precisely no qualifications other than his craven loyalty and stated willingness to corrupt the bureau’s mission to serve Donald Trump’s personal vendettas. In fact, in the days before he was confirmed, one piece of normally fatally compromising information after another came out about him and those 51 Republican senators charged ahead anyway, without even bothering to ask follow-up questions.

The FBI, which leads national security investigations in the United States and is responsible for counterintelligence and espionage cases, sees the nation’s top two adversaries as China and Russia — and yet the Republican Senate confirmed Patel after discovering he has financial ties to both countries, and his financial ties to China will apparently continue while he’s in office! Mother Jones reported, “Kash Patel took $25,000 from Russia-linked firm to appear on an anti-FBI TV series” made by “a filmmaker tied to Russian propaganda efforts.” Other reports in recent days have uncovered how Patel has been consulting for the Chinese parent of the fashion company Shein and that he now has stock offerings in the range of $1 million to $5 million — shares he’s said he plans to hold onto in office. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, “which effectively means he will have a continuing financial relationship with a foreign company.” But not just any foreign company — a Chinese company, while leading the US’s Chinese counterintelligence operations!

Add to all of that the charges by Democrat senators — uninvestigated by the Republican-led Senate that seems to have no bar for shame or its constitutional requirement to “advise and consent” on Trump nominations — that Patel committed perjury in his own Senate confirmation, disavowing knowledge of the purge that was happening at the FBI that same afternoon, even as senators like Dick Durbin say there’s evidence he was involved.

And those 51 senators voted to confirm him anyway. But again, don’t take my word for how dangerous this is. Here’s Marco Rubio’s former general counsel, Gregg Nunziata, posting on X: “Kash Patel should have been a redline. Bongino is what you get when R Senators fail to do their jobs and say no to Patel. The Trump Admin is turning federal law enforcement over to unqualified, unprincipled, partisan henchmen. It's unacceptable and conservatives need to say so.”

Whatever FBI emerges from the chaos and dust ahead will be an institution fundamentally different than the one that has been carefully constructed and stewarded by the half-dozen directors since J. Edgar Hoover. It was a bureau with numerous faults, problems, and abuses, but one that had decade by decade built careful guardrails and oversight regimes to ensure that it would not be turned into a political weapon as it was during the Hoover years.

Ever since Hoover, the FBI director has been appointed to a ten-year term, meant to insulate the role from political pressure and day-to-day politics, and unlike most other senior roles in Washington, it never before has been a role that turned over simply because a new president was elected. Moreover, the size and complexity of the bureau all-but required a long tenure — it takes years to learn and operate the bureau effectively and even someone as experienced as Bob Mueller was when he took over (he’d served twice in top roles at the Justice Department, including as acting deputy attorney general, and been a federal prosecutor and US attorney for years before and in between) found that it was really only around the five-year-mark of his tenure that he reached peak effectiveness.

That model of an independent director and bureau is now forever broken; any Democrat who might win the presidency in 2028 — and color me pessimistically skeptical that we’re currently on track for free and fair elections in 2028 — will certainly remove Trump’s FBI director at noon on January 20^th and almost certainly reach down to remove upper rungs of leaders too. What Democratic president would ever trust even a career agent who rose to the top ranks of the bureau in a Patel-Bongino regime? The same would go again if, say, the White House is recaptured in turn by a Republican MAGA-esque president in 2032 or 2036.

The bells that have rung now at the FBI cannot be unrung. And we will rue the day we didn’t hear them as dire warnings for the country’s future.

Add to the mystery of how this will all unfold another puzzling weekend announcement: Patel, as early as this week, will apparently also be sworn in as the acting director of the ATF — itself a large, complex sprawling federal law enforcement agency. How he will manage both (or if they will even bother trying) is an open question; rumors swirled in Washington over the weekend that the White House hopes to just merge the two agencies and may even move ATF leaders into some of the vacant positions atop the FBI purged in January.

The FBI has long been a calling. I’ve interviewed and spoken with hundreds of agents and personnel at all levels over the years — including many agents who joined in the Hoover years! — and they join the bureau out of patriotism to serve its mission. They believe in the institution and its values deeply at their core, even as many recognize the need for reforms and changes. Whatever the FBI is this morning, whatever it will be tomorrow, will be something fundamentally different than the thing they signed up to serve. And I fear that it will never be the thing again that it has been the entire time I’ve been alive.

GMG

PS: Interestingly, the merger of the ATF and FBI is a long-debated and serious proposal with meaningful potential benefits, albeit this is surely not the team to do it thoughtfully and with meaningful upside. It is more likely to result in the decapitation and neutering of the ATF, which has itself long been hated by Republicans for the “firearms” portion of its portfolio. For more on that, see my podcast LONG SHADOW, where we’ve done seasons on the rise of the far-right and on gun policy.