On Saturday evening, as many Americans were polishing off Thanksgiving leftovers, President-elect Donald Trump served up a dish too tough to digest. On his Truth Social platform, Trump announced his choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Many of Trump’s nominees have substantial baggage, but the Patel pick tells us the most about Trump’s plan to subjugate the rule of law to his own rules — minus the law part.
It isn’t just that Patel is wholly unqualified to lead the pre-eminent law enforcement and intelligence agency in the nation and perhaps the world. Yes, he lacks the professional experience needed to lead the bureau’s 37,000 employees in 55 U.S. field offices, 350 satellite offices and 63 locations abroad that cover nearly 200 countries. But that’s the least of my concerns. After all, Trump’s picks for homeland security secretary, director of national intelligence and defense secretary are also remarkably lacking in competency for their proposed roles. Trump’s first choice for attorney general was so problematic that he withdrew from consideration before the Senate confirmation process could begin.
Court findings and the jury system are things that should matter to an FBI director.
Patel’s particular problem goes far beyond competence: His record shows no devotion to the Constitution, but blind allegiance to Trump. Patel helped spread the fabricated conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump. He has promoted the conspiracy of a “deep state” within government institutions whose aim is to topple Trump. Court findings and the jury system are things that should matter to an FBI director, yet Patel seems not to care that more than 60 court challenges found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, nor that grand juries and trial juries of American citizens determined Trump should be criminally indicted, held civilly liable and even convicted.
If he becomes FBI director, Patel will have to take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, but his public statements raise concerns about his ability to keep that oath. In an interview last year with Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Patel promised to pursue judges, lawyers and even journalists he perceived as having wrongly investigated Trump and influenced the 2020 election. “We will go out and find the conspirators,” he told Bannon, “not just in government but in the media — yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” That doesn’t sound like a man who intends to strictly adhere to the rule of law. It sounds like a wannabe cop planning on false arrests and fabricated evidence.
This wouldn’t be the first time in our nation’s history that an FBI director blindly pursued perceived enemies and threats in the absence of all-important evidence. As I wrote earlier this year, in the 1960s, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “with the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and later with the encouragement of President Lyndon Johnson, illegally wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. The FBI sent a letter to King, using details uncovered in the wiretap, essentially blackmailing King and suggesting he kill himself. There were countless “black bag jobs” where the FBI, without court authorization, broke into people’s homes, took evidence, opened and read mail, and planted microphones — all outside the law, because someone in power deemed those American citizens to pose some kind of threat.”
“In 1968 and into the 1970s, Hoover claimed the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to internal security of the United States.” (It wasn’t.) He discussed the Black Panthers with then-President Richard Nixon and got the green light to go after them when, as Nixon directed, “you sort of had the scent of the smell of a national conspiracy thing. You know, the kind of thing like the Panthers, and all that.” Unsurprisingly, these sorts of actions did not stop at the Panthers. Nixon ordered the FBI to unlawfully wiretap members of the media without benefit of lawful court orders, simply because Nixon didn’t like those reporters.
Inscribed on a statue in front of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., are the words, “What is past is prologue.” That quote from William Shakespeare is meant to convey that history determines our future. The question posed by Patel’s nomination for FBI director is whether we’ve learned anything from our history or whether we are destined to repeat it.