Five Reasons America Should Fear Kash Patel atop Trump's FBI

Amid all the chaos of the first Trump administration, I don’t think anyone captured what it was like living through that time like comedian John Mulaney. “This guy being the president—it's like there's a horse loose in a hospital,” he joked. “I think eventually everything's gonna be okay, but I have no idea what's gonna happen next.”

Watch the whole thing. In one part of the bit, Mulaney joked, “[There are] quiet days when people are like, ‘It looks like the horse has finally calmed down,’ and then ten seconds later the horse is like, ‘I’m gonna run towards the baby incubators and smash ‘em with my hooves.’”

That’s much how I’ve felt in the last couple of weeks—I forget about the looming awfulness and danger of a Trump presidency for hours at a time and then the horse reappears with a new announcement. That particularly was my experience Saturday night: I’d had a wonderful holiday-spirited day, delivering cookies to indie bookstores to celebrate Small Business Saturday, and then around 7 pm word broke that Trump intended to nominate Kash Patel to head the FBI.

For anyone who knows the FBI or knows about Kash Patel, that nomination is a disaster—not least of all because it’s also Trump indicating he intends to fire the current director, Chris Wray, for politically motivated reasons.

The truth is America knows exactly what a weaponized FBI looks like—it’s exactly the corrupt, civil-liberties-abusing, political-friend-rewarding, enemy-punishing institution that J. Edgar Hoover had perfected by the end of his half-century-reign as director—and it horrified Americans, Congress, and presidents when it was fully exposed in the 1970s. We’ve spent the half-century since putting in numerous institutional safeguards to ensure it could never become that again—all of which Donald Trump looks keen to destroy.

Since 1930, there have been only eight confirmed FBI directors. I’ve interviewed six of those eight—including four of them at meaningful length—and known eight of the last nine FBI deputy directors on a first-name basis. I’ve reported on the bureau for fifteen years, written three books (and a podcast!) with the FBI as a centerpiece, written scores of magazine articles about the bureau, visited a couple dozen domestic field offices and traveled to see FBI task forces overseas, interviewed somewhere upwards of 250 agents and executives whose careers span from the Hoover years to the current iteration. I’ve lectured about the FBI to internal FBI conferences, and I think I’m the only reporter who has traveled with an FBI director aboard the FBI’s Gulfstream jet at least in the last quarter century.

I say all of that to establish the following: I know the FBI pretty well—its mythology, unique culture, its investigative DNA, its legal authorities and public cache, and its special role protecting and defending (and sometimes even threatening) the American way of life.

So let me say this simply: Donald Trump wants Kash Patel as the FBI director for all of the wrong reasons. He wants Patel precisely because Patel would be the most dangerous and destructive FBI director in American history. He wants Patel because Patel will try to weaponize the FBI against Trump’s enemies. Trump feels like he’s never been able to sufficiently “order around” FBI directors he’s had, James Comey and Chris Wray, and he wants someone who will stop telling him he can’t do things and instead leap to anticipate his whims.

I wrote an oped in the NYT today about the danger of Kash Patel, and there have been several great pieces in recent days expanding on similar themes. If you’re just coming to know his name, start with this profile of him from earlier in the year. He is not merely a MAGA loyalist; he is an extremist even by MAGA standards.

I wanted to expand, though, on the reasons why someone like Patel is specifically dangerous atop an institution like the FBI.

Let me also be clear up front: I fully understand why many, on all parts of the political spectrum, are wary of the modern FBI. The FBI has a long and troubling record of abusing civil rights and civil liberties of Americans across the political spectrum; if you want to know more about the highly-honed political weapon that Hoover turned the bureau into, read Beverly Gage’s biography of Hoover, which won the Pulitzer last year and which was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Moreover, I have plenty of my own criticisms (and have been vocal in TV interviews) about how recent directors James Comey and Chris Wray have mishandled their roles over the last decade. I have also sued (and won against) the FBI and Justice Department to open up files they didn’t want to share and know specifically how prickly the bureau can be about talking about its mistakes.

At the same time, despite its faults, the FBI is enormously important to the fabric of American life. It has tens of thousands of agents, analysts, and technicians who solve big crimes and little ones all across the country every single day—from unraveling terrorism cases to stopping bank robbers to preventing espionage and much much more. The two most recent FBI special agents to die in the line of duty were killed while trying to arrest a child predator.

Here are five reasons that particularly stick out for me about why installing Kash Patel at the J. Edgar Hoover Building begins a journey no sane American should want and the safeguards that Trump seems set to destroy:

1) The FBI is a position of immense public trust. As I point out in the NYT, every previous FBI director in my lifetime has come to the role after a career in public service and after having been vetted, nominated, and confirmed to other Senate-confirmed roles. Patel not only doesn’t have that shining track record, he has the opposite concern: The very people who have worked most closely with him in government previously say he’s not at all worthy of trust. Take this Wall Street Journal reporting from yesterday:

Attorney General Bill Barr, not exactly a friend to the norms of independence at the Justice Department, said he’d tolerate Patel working at the FBI “over his dead body,” and blasted in his book later:

2) Everything in the FBI’s history tells us we don’t want this job to be treated like any other political appointee. Again, we know what a weaponized FBI looks like, and America recoiled from it collectively. As I also wrote this morning, the most corrupt part of announcing Patel as the FBI nominee is that THERE IS NO JOB OPENING AT THE FBI. The Republican official Donald Trump himself nominated to be FBI director as president is still there and has two years left on his fixed ten-year term.

The fixed, single ten-year-term was created after Hoover’s reign to ensure both the director’s political independence but also to balance that no American would ever accumulate the power that Hoover had over an institution as powerful and far-reaching as the FBI. Presidents and directors ever since have gone out of their way to avoid the whiff of “politics as usual” in FBI appointments. It’s not meant to be a job that turns over at noon on January 20th with a new administration, precisely because it’s too powerful to be treated like any other crony role.

3) Weaponizing the FBI doesn’t have to end with concentration camps. As is often the case, I think the “worst case scenarios” trotted out in the media both over-estimate and also under-estimate the damage to come in the Trump era. My full reaction and thoughts on the Hunter Biden pardon are a whole other essay entirely, but one way to interpret Biden’s surprise Sunday night pardon of his son is as a knee-jerk reaction to the horror of what four years of political persecution of Hunter by the FBI could look like. This is what I wrote in the NYT about that:

I think the Hunter Biden pardon is less about what Biden’s already been prosecuted about and more what Father Biden worried a Patel-directed FBI would do in the coming years to Son Biden.

4) The FBI is, sadly, the nation’s only bulwark against public corruption. Not many people realize that the FBI is really only the federal law enforcement agency—and really the only law enforcement agency at any level, broadly speaking—that focuses on public corruption, the day-to-day vices, schemes, and graft of elected officials and people in positions of trust. Just imagine how a partisan MAGA-friendly FBI director could reshape that investigative landscape—weaponizing the FBI isn’t just about persecuting enemies, it’s also about NOT prosecuting friends. Kash Patel atop the FBI is a message to all sufficiently loyal MAGA backers (and, particularly, Trump family members!): It’s open season on bribes, graft, pay-offs, and honeypots. Take all the money and corrupt favors you want to influence federal policies, contracts, and appointments—we don’t care whether it’s Russian, Saudi, cartels, or crypto-fraudsters. It’s yours for the taking, and we’ll look the other way

5) The FBI should actually be MORE “woke,” not less. One of the strangest parts of Donald Trump’s years-long war against the FBI as some bastion of liberal wokeness is that the reality is that the FBI is one of the most conservative institutions in the US government, second only perhaps to the military itself. But there’s an important distinction with the institutionally conservative Pentagon: Whereas the military is the most diverse institution in the US government, the FBI’s corps of special agents does not come close to representing America. It remains overwhelming white, male, and Christian, and it has long battled sexual and racial discrimination lawsuits. The FBI, across generations, has actually been the primary persecutor of civil rights activists, Black literary figures, antiwar activists, and more—it even tried to arrest and expel John Lennon from the US. There’s an entire excellent (and troubling) book about how Hoover instilled a white Christian evangelical worldview into the FBI’s DNA. The last three FBI directors have cared about diversity and tried hard to improve the mix of the FBI’s ranks—now having an FBI director come to power expressly against diversity will set these efforts back decades. And while, yes, that’s precisely what Donald Trump and MAGA voters wanted, it’s not the FBI we should want for America.

The early signs out of the Senate are not encouraging, as POLITICO rounded up a variety of “moderate” and “thoughtful” GOP senators expressing openness to Patel. As I wrote earlier in November, I think many of Trump’s appointments are like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park testing the fences—trying to figure out whether and where guardrails exist, if at all. Patel, unfortunately, seems like he’s within the bounds of what the Senate will consider—if only because he seems, by comparison, not quite as loathsome as Matt Gaetz and perhaps not an alleged sexual abuser like Pete Hegseth.

So while I hold out eternal hope that there is some modicum of seriousness left in the GOP Senate caucus—all recent history shows that’s a bad bet!—and perhaps Senate Republicans will look seriously at Patel’s thin management resume and long list of outlandish statements and deem him unfit, there remains a troubling other wild card looming over his nomination and every Trump unqualified and corrupt nominee, from Patel to Tulsi Gabbard to Hegseth: Trump’s threat that he might try to install these officials regardless and end-running the senate confirmation process through recess appointees. It’s possible that the Senate will never even get to weigh in on the danger of Kash Patel.

GMG

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