Three Scenarios—and a Scary Truth—About Kash Patel’s FBI

First off, welcome to the new edition of Doomsday Scenario, my regular newsletter about whether things are really as bad as they seem. It has a new look, as you can see, and I’ve moved it from Substack to a platform called beehiiv. I’ll talk more about all of that in the weeks ahead. As always, I hope you find this interesting and useful as we navigate this challenging time in America together. Please share and forward this essay if you find it useful.

For now, onto our main event:

The Danger of Kash Patel Atop the FBI

Kash Patel, the most dangerous and least qualified candidate to lead the FBI in its history, is set for his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday. Worryingly inexperienced to lead the bureau by historic standards and a MAGA loyalist par excellence, he has been nominated by Donald Trump precisely because he hopes to upend the bureau and weaponize it against the Trump regime’s enemies, from journalists to Members of Congress to Democrats.  

But what would an FBI led by Kash Patel actually look like? To imagine that, I wanted to sketch out three broad scenarios for how we might see the FBI evolve over the years ahead and also talk about one, specific scary truth about how the Trump administration and Patel’s leadership might impact the country.

The following scenarios are informed by recent conversations with bureau and Justice Department sources, as well as my own deep experience covering the FBI and trying to understanding its unique mythology, culture, authorities, and the important and special role it has to protect and defend (and sometimes even threaten) the American way of life.

For new readers, let me reiterate a bit about that deep experience with the FBI: 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, devoured tens of thousands of pages of declassified documents (including some I sued the Justice Department to receive), 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.

One important note: These scenarios are not mutually exclusive—the most likely future we will face as a country is that parts or much of all of these scenarios could unfold simultaneously.

1) The Hoover Building Battles Back — The FBI is bureaucratic. It is hide-bound, tradition-bound, and inflexible. It requires an enormous amount of paperwork. As agents joke, bureaucracy is literally the FBI’s middle name. The first day I ever spent with then-director Robert Mueller, back in 2008, he was speaking at a new agent graduation in Quantico. The class speaker joked that the training taught new agents the FBI has a form for everything and that he had to fill out five forms just to speak at graduation. I noticed it was a joke that rang so true that even Mueller’s stone-faced security detail door cracked a smile, and Mueller quickly shot back that the class was lucky—it used to be twenty forms to speak at graduation but they had streamlined it to just five.

Kash Patel is walking into the FBI knowing less about how the building works, its centers of power, its levers, its personalities, and its authorities than any director in decades. He is, for the most part, a junior, mid-level, unseasoned staffer who has been promoted by the MAGA world far beyond his experience. If the building and bureaucracy decides to push back on his whims and — as it should — refuse to target political enemies without clear authorities and appropriate factual predication required to open a criminal or national security investigation than Patel might really struggle to accomplish almost anything. “Oh, you want to persecute journalists? Please make sure to fill out the right form and deliver it to the right office down some confusing hallway in the sad, Kafkaesque maze that is our outdated and neglected Hoover Building, one we’re still stuck with because President Trump didn’t want this real estate going to a competing hotel.”

The FBI has spent fifty years building antibodies against the type of political targeting Hoover used to do. Every step of an investigation requires different legal processes and ever-advancing levels of evidence and are cross-checked against the underlying criminal statutes. Agents and executives are carefully attuned to their unique and limited authorities and careers are made by staying in their lane and coloring within the lines to a fault. The FBI is also, for the most part, very slow and methodical. There are plenty of investigations that the FBI started somewhere about something this month that won’t wrap up for four or five years. All of this is cause to think that at least some of the worst impulses of a Patel directorship might be avoided, at least in the near-term.

There are a half-dozen layers of bureaucracy to navigate even before you get out of the FBI headquarters itself—a deputy director, associate deputy director, executive assistant directors who lead the larger branches (e.g., national security), assistant directors who lead the more specific divisions (cyber or counterintelligence), deputy assistant directors, section chiefs, and unit chiefs. If the building resists Patel—or even if Patel just turns out to be narrowly focused on persecution and bad on follow-through—he might spend almost all of his time doing battle with these layers inside the Hoover Building. In fact, that sort of seems to be what Patel wants—he clearly thinks the “rot” inside the bureau comes from Washington. He’s said he wants to fire the top officials and even close headquarters altogether.

Meanwhile, life in the 55 field offices could continue apace. The FBI does two things very well — it’s very good at the big cases, throwing incredible, huge resources at the most urgent incidents, and the small ones, where a single agent or squad toil away far from the spotlight in the nether regions of the FBI. I’ve always been amazed at how much of the FBI’s success stems from agents working independently far from Washington on cases they’re uniquely driven to solve.

One of the downstream impacts of Chris Wray’s quiet approach to leading the FBI is that in many ways the field offices today are more independent than they have been at any time since 9/11; Mueller spent much of his tenure trying to more tightly bind the field to headquarters and make it more responsive to national concerns, but Wray’s seven-year tenure let the field assert their own fiefdoms. It’s possible that Patel spends a lot of time excising the “woke” from the FBI (despite it being the least-woke corner of federal law enforcement — in fact, Patel, if confirmed, will be the first non-white person to lead the FBI, the last of the ten major federal law enforcement agencies to have never had a woman or person of color as director or deputy director) and that most agents working in the field never feel the difference.

2) Patel Returns The FBI To The Dark Ages — It’s also possible, of course, that Kash Patel wins. Even as bureaucratic as the FBI is, it also respects and reveres the position of director more deeply than any corner of the federal government I’ve ever encountered. The bureau’s hierarchy can make the military look downright egalitarian. The director’s word is gospel, and I was always struck by how agents refer formally to their bosses as “Mr.” or “Ms.” even after years of working together. You want to get something done fast in the Hoover Building? Namecheck an EAD or AD or otherwise refer to one of the few people in headquarters carrying the coveted gold badges, as opposed to the more usual blue badges, and people snap to it.

Louis Freeh used to tell a story about how he once asked for help hanging a picture in his office on the seventh-floor and not too long after, a team of building engineers burst in at the ready and asked which wall he wanted removed—his request had gotten magnified and exaggerated at every layer as it ran downhill and the building wanted to grant him his request as quickly as possible. It’s possible that even small directives from Patel get magnified and exaggerated as they propagate and a massive dragnet of surveillance and harassment hits Trump’s enemies large and small. Sure, maybe there are too many Trump enemies in DC that they overwhelm the Washington Field Office’s resources, but the FBI has 400 smaller resident agencies across the country and you could imagine a future where ambitious agents in those further-flung regions zero in on the smaller group of Trump enemies who, say, live in Texas, Illinois, or — gulp — Vermont. The FBI ruined lots of careers and lives during the Red Scares of the 1910s, 1940s, and 1950s, including not just big names but plenty of people you’ve never heard of, and we still haven’t reckoned with that damage today.

Beyond the power of the FBI hierarchy, Patel is going to find corners of the bureau who will welcome and embrace his broom-cleaning. Parts of the bureau are also more MAGA-aligned ideologically than one might imagine; there has also never been an appropriate reckoning with how the New York Field Office’s political alignment with candidate Trump and leaks to Rudy Giuliani in 2016 helped drive then-director James Comey to reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation in the final hours of that year’s presidential election.

The FBI director’s primary way of influencing the FBI is through its promotions and leadership appointments and so, with simple passage of time, Patel will fill ever more of those layers of bureaucracy and its org chart with people he and the White House want. He might spend much of this year or next battling the Hoover Building, but with time — particularly if the FBI’s good soldiers and best leaders beat feet for more lucrative roles in the private sector and more positions open more quickly — Patel might get what he wants. 

We have seen what a weaponized FBI looks like. It is the system that J. Edgar Hoover perfected by the 1960s that persecuted political dissidents, illegally investigated and wiretapped presidential enemies, blackmailed LGBTQ people in Washington, encouraged Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide, abused the civil rights and civil liberties of thousands of ordinary Americans practicing their First Amendment rights, and lorded secret vices to pressure Members of Congress and presidents. It was a bureau so anathema to a functioning democracy that, when Congress, activists, and journalists excavated its sins in the 1970s, we’ve since spent 50 years building up oversight structures and guardrails to ensure it can’t happen ever again.

Nor are the decades of internal safeguards and guardrails the FBI and Justice Department built up necessarily as reassuring as they should be. If the first week of the second Trump administration has taught us anything — if the entire nine-year experience of the Trump era has taught us anything — it’s that our system of government and democracy is far more fragile and thinly held than we understood. Most of it exists as easily-discarded norms and “following the law” feels an increasingly quaint proposition, one where simply ignoring the law seems to come with ever-fewer consequences. In a situation where the FBI starts simply ignoring the law — and the Justice Department, Congress, and the courts don’t care and the inspectors general are gone — it’s no longer clear that there’s a meaningful consequence or protection ahead. 

Here’s one reason that may not occur to GOP senators yet why they should oppose this vision and Patel, beyond all the obvious ones: The FBI is a giant, slow-changing aircraft carrier. He may break down its norms and promote political animals just in time for it to be handed to a future president less aligned with the MAGA loyalists who benefit from its “enemy’s list” of today. You think you’re in favor now? What about tomorrow?

America has firmly rejected the FBI Kash Patel wants to build, but we may get it anyway again.

3) The Dysfunction Causes the FBI To Fail America Catastrophically. There are two specific and entirely foreseeable ways that an FBI led in Patel’s vision would fail America.

First, there’s the actual danger that abdicating its national security responsibilities would bring to the country. Patel’s stated vision for the FBI seeks to return the not just to the Hoover years, when it was famously weaponized against enemies and political dissidents, but also a return to the pre-9/11 FBI, when it was more a “law enforcement agency” than a “national security-focused intelligence agency.”

Patel sees, wrongly, that the FBI’s major intelligence responsibilities, from espionage to terrorism, and its surveillance authorities as the center of its “Deep State” plot against Trump. He has been explicit that he wants it to scale back those activities. He did battle with the intel side of the FBI during the first Trump administration and is raring to do so again. “Go be cops,” he said in one podcast last year. 

It’s a recipe for cutting back on vital national security investigations (China! ISIS!) but also for undoing hugely important, hard, and consequential work since 9/11 to build up intelligence sharing among US intelligence and law enforcement agencies — cooperation that sees that FBI, CIA, and NSA work more closely and smoothly together today than they ever have, all in an effort to prevent “not connecting the dots” like the US government did with al-Qaeda in the late 1990s and early 2000s, failures that resulted in the success of the September 11^th plot. 

Does America need a thoughtful debate about the right way to rebalance civil liberties and intelligence surveillance authorities a quarter-century after 9/11? Sure. Is Kash Patel going to lead that thoughtful and nuanced discussion? Absolutely not.

We know where undoing this work leads, because we’ve lived this failure before: The FBI scaling back its national security mission is a recipe for a national catastrophe and a failure of imagination on the scale of the nation’s worst incidents and darkest hours: the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings, 9/11, the 2016 Russian attack on the election, or January 6^th.

An FBI afraid or unwilling to investigate national security threats or paralyzed by government dysfunction is a recipe for a future day of infamy, one that comes with a toll of American lives.

There’s a second, specific way that a MAGA-friendly Patel-led FBI would damage our country: It would fail our democracy. The thing about federal law enforcement is that there are widely overlapping jurisdictions—the ATF can (and usually does) investigate many of the violent crimes that the FBI could. The DEA handles many drug cases that might end up on the FBI’s plate. The Secret Service and Homeland Security Investigation could (but probably won’t) pick up some of the cyber fraud cases if the FBI drops the ball. There’s really only one area of jurisdiction where the FBI stands totally alone: Public corruption. Only the FBI — alone almost among all local, state, and federal agencies — goes after corruption politicians and government workers who abuse the public trust.

I wrote about this last month, when Patel was first nominated, but it’s worth repeating: An FBI led by Kash Patel is a recipe for corruption by Trump, his family, friends, and all loyal MAGA backers, from Alex Jones to Stewart Rhoades, that they can engage in criminal behavior all they want. Trump in his first days has already shown how he will abuse the pardon power to free loyalists and reward his backers — including dangerous January 6^th protesters and the creator of the darkweb marketplace Silk Road, a massive scale drug dealer implicated in a murder-for-hire plot, as some of kind of weird thank you to crypto-bros — and so just imagine what NEW crimes his backers might pursue for their profit and against our democracy if Patel gives them the green light. As I wrote last month:

That Patel himself is a merch-hawking Trump hanger-on, a guy who sells a pack of playing cards featuring former FBI director James Comey as the joker, someone who has more experience in social media and e-commerce than he does leading federal law enforcement, only underscores the opportunity ahead for corruption at an epic and democracy-ruining scale.

Now we get to the scary truth: The dysfunction that paralyzes the FBI and causes it to fail in its most basic responsibilities to protect America doesn’t have to come solely from within the FBI. In fact, there’s good reason to think we’re already heading in that direction simply because of actions Trump is taking elsewhere in federal law enforcement.

As powerful as we imagine the FBI to be, its strength primarily comes from its partnership and its brand name. The FBI doesn’t do anything alone.

When the bureau says it has Legal Attaches in some 60 countries overseas, what that means in reality is it two agents sitting in a cubbyhole in the US embassy who try to make friends with and ask for favors from local foreign enforcement.

When the FBI brags it has 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country — the backbone of countering foreign and domestic terrorist threats for decades — that means it has teams of local, state, tribal, and federal agents and officers working together side-by-side from all manner of agencies in FBI-provided offices to investigate tips from the community and informants and follow leads on the nation’s most serious threats.

When it says it has a National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, that means it has a team of dozens of agencies who work closely with private sector industry and other groups, like the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, to share information and identify bad actors online.

Any or all of these investigative resources and strengths start to fall apart the moment others—from foreign governments to state officials to local leaders to private industry to ordinary Americans—decide to think twice about cooperating with the FBI. Each of those JTTF officers and officers is assigned there by his or her home agency, a valuable street investigator taken out of rotation in their home department to serve the greater good of the regional task force. Each of those officers or agents can be pulled out by their home agency if they find that the JTTF isn’t serving the community or is pursuing an ideological agenda.

Trump already appears inclined to undermine and redirect the careful, decades-long work to build up those critical JTTFs: Last week, he directed the JTTFs to begin focusing on immigration cases, ordering them “to assist in the execution of President Trump’s immigration-related initiatives.” Depending on how that’s implemented, that could cause local or state partners to pull their officers and agents out of JTTFs. This actually happened in the first Trump administration, when communities like San Francisco pulled out of their local JTTF in the wake of the Muslim Ban.

Then there’s the public cooperation side: Most Americans don’t understand the difference between different federal agencies or law enforcement and a national reluctance to cooperate with the government — particularly among minority communities that are being aggressively targeted by newly draconian and badly implemented immigration dragnets — could blind the FBI in important ways. Trump has already muddied the waters by deputizing marshals, DEA, and ATF agents with immigration enforcement powers. Much good historically comes from other federal law enforcement agencies being able to knock on doors and say, “we’re not here about immigration violations.” But now almost any knock anywhere from any agency could be immigration-related, and that’s going to shut federal law enforcement out of a lot of places, meetings, and conversations where it used to be welcome.

Moreover, all of the FBI’s investigations, from its smallest violent or white-collar crime cases to its biggest espionage or terror cases, are reliant on the help and cooperation of assistant US attorneys from the Justice Department. And the recent decrees from the Justice Department to prioritize immigration offenses above almost literally all other cases means that even if everything is humming along smoothly at the FBI, there is now less time for prosecutors to work with agents on any of their cases. There are only so many assistant US attorneys in the country and all of them are limited by the same 24-hours-in-a-day spacetime continuum problems as everyone else. What most Americans have forgotten is that when Trump prioritized prosecuting immigration violations in his first term, federal prosecutions of more serious criminals, like drug smugglers, actually went down.

Of all of the Trump nominees, Patel ranks among the most dangerous. America deserves better. So does the FBI. I hope, as the confirmation hearing unfolds tomorrow, a handful of Republican senators recognize that as well.

Thanks for reading!

GMG

PS: This Week’s Book Recommendation: