Kash Patel's Job is to Corrupt the FBI
Trump picked Patel to end impartial law enforcement—his record isn't subtle—and if Senators have any respect for rule-of-law, they'll reject his nomination
Kash Patel stands for one thing: The purpose of federal law enforcement is not to impartially enforce the law. Law enforcement’s job, he thinks, is to advance the president’s personal interests — harass his critics into silence and help him abuse power, breaking the law as needed. That is why Trump nominated him for FBI Director.
The nomination itself is an unprecedented abuse of power. The FBI Director has a ten-year term, longer than the eight consecutive years of a reelected president, to insulate law enforcement from politics. Presidents at the start of their term do not nominate FBI Directors the way they nominate Cabinet Secretaries, not least because Secretaries leave with the outgoing administration while FBI Directors do not.
To get this opening for Patel, Trump had to push out FBI Director Christopher Wray, who resigned with three years left on his term. The only pre-Trump instance of a president removing an FBI Director was Bill Clinton firing William Sessions in 1993, but that came after a months-long investigation produced a detailed report documenting Sessions’ misappropriation of funds.
There’s no evidence Wray acted inappropriately, and any notion that Wray was a Democratic partisan is absurd. He’s a lifelong Republican who led the DOJ’s Criminal Division under President George W. Bush, was nominated as FBI Director in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump, and confirmed in a Republican-led Senate by a bipartisan vote of 92-5.
“Our job as investigators at the FBI,” Wray explained on his way out, “is to follow the facts wherever they lead, no matter who likes it.” That’s what Trump objected to: not just to where the facts led, but to the very idea of an FBI Director who follows the facts and the law, rather than suppressing facts to help cover up Trump and associates’ lawbreaking. Under Wray, the FBI investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, leading to hundreds of convictions in court. And after months of special deference, the FBI executed a judge-signed search warrant at then-ex-president Trump’s home/resort Mar-a-Lago to recover classified national security secrets Trump illegally stole, lied about, potentially exposed, and refused to return.
Wray was FBI Director due to one of Trump’s earliest abuses of power in his first term: firing Wray’s predecessor James Comey. As with Wray, Trump’s objection to Comey was that Comey did the job properly. Part of the FBI’s purview is counterintelligence, Russia had conducted a large anti-American intelligence operation targeting the 2016 election, and the FBI was looking into it. Trump, presumably knowing that would, at minimum, reveal unflattering information about himself and potentially expose associates to criminal charges, asked Comey to drop the investigation out of personal loyalty. When Comey, a lifelong Republican, offered honesty and loyalty to the Constitution instead—as per his oath of office—Trump fired him, admitting in a subsequent interview he did it to obstruct the Russia investigation.
That was early in Trump’s first term, when there were still “adults in the room,” and Republican Senators retained some support for rule of law, so we got a professional like Chris Wray rather than a lackey like Kash Patel. That’s not the case in Trump Term II.
The Hackiest Hack
Patel doesn’t have high-level experience like Comey and Wray did before becoming FBI Director, though he did serve as a Justice Department trial attorney for three years. But he made his name as a Trump-defending conspiracy theorist.
Working in 2018 as an aide to the Trump-sycophantic chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, Patel was an author of the “Nunes Memo” aimed at undermining the FBI’s Russia investigation. The memo tried alleging that the investigation was illegitimate by claiming it began with opposition research from the Hillary Clinton campaign, but admitted that it began based on a tip from an Australian diplomat, who Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos blabbed to in a London bar.
Having shown his commitment to MAGA kayfabe, Patel got a series of positions in the Trump administration: Senior Director of Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, a principal deputy with the Director of National Intelligence, and then, after Trump lost reelection in 2020, Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense, part of an unprecedented post-election purge of national security officials. In the Pentagon, Patel searched for ways to help Trump overturn the election, obstructed the transition to Biden, and exercised considerable influence over defense policy. The public still doesn’t know the full extent of what he did.
Also among Patel’s qualifications: He wrote a children’s book called The Plot Against the King, in which evil “Hillary Queenton” says that “King Donald” cheated to become king, but a wizard-like character named “Kash” shows that she made it all up.
As ridiculous as this is, we live in a time of absurd liars, so I have to point out that Russia’s real intelligence operation and the Trump campaign’s real connections to it have been extensively detailed by reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the (Republican-chaired) Senate Intelligence Committee. Also, America has a president, not a king. Rebelling against a king is why the United States exists, and the proud tradition of a president limited by law goes back to George Washington.
Trump picked Patel because Patel has shown he’s not just a devout loyalist, but an eager participant, who will lie and threaten people to Trump’s benefit without shame. As the FBI Director in an administration hostile to rule of law, Patel will abuse power to attack Trump’s political enemies.
Every Senator knows this, though some will pretend not to. Patel hasn’t been subtle about it, and neither has Trump. Throughout the 2024 campaign and the years leading up to it, Trump called for prosecuting Americans for the definitely-not-crimes of:
Telling the truth about Donald Trump in public and exposing more of his abuses in office (GOP former Rep. Liz Cheney, Dem now-Senator Adam Schiff)
Following the law while working in the first Trump administration rather than breaking the law on his behalf, and subsequently speaking about his illegal schemes in public (Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Attorney General Bill Barr)
Leading the Democratic Party in an election against Donald Trump (Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris).
Investigating and prosecuting Donald Trump in accordance with proper procedure for crimes he definitely did (Special Counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, various lawyers and officers)
Even if courts ultimately reject all the charges as insufficiently supported, the investigations alone would be burdensome, forcing targets to spend a lot of time and money.
Even if none are sentenced to prison, the effort will have a strong chilling effect. Many Americans—societal elites, lower level federal workers, average citizens online, you name it—will refrain from some public criticism and institutional opposition, fearing that they’d be harassed like the famous Trump targets, but less able to mount a defense.
And that’s the relatively positive scenario.
Law Enforcement Leaders for Breaking Rule of Law
Kash Patel is America’s most enthusiastic, vocal proponent of conducting those illegitimate prosecutions. He pushes conspiracy theories, including QAnon, which fantasizes about an evil “deep state”—basically any government official or prominent figure who opposes Donald Trump—getting a violent comeuppance. Patel wrote a book (this one for adults) called Government Gangsters that denounces the “deep state” and lists 60 supposed members, which overlaps heavily with the names Trump threatens.
In a December 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel explained his ambitions like this:
“We will go out and find the conspirators — 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. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
He will try something along those lines if confirmed by the Senate. No matter what he says in his confirmation hearing, Patel’s long record indicates he will. Confidently assuming he won’t is naive at best.
He will have encouragement from the president, the first in U.S. history to operate without fear of impeachment or criminal prosecution. Trump has already fired more than a dozen DOJ employees, and will continue purging the department of law-followers, opening spots for loyalists. And Patel will likely work in concert with a corrupt, pro-fraud Attorney General in Pam Bondi, who the Senate is expected to confirm.
As Florida state attorney general, Bondi faced numerous accusations of corruption, including one where she declined to join a fraud suit against Trump University shortly after getting a $25,000 donation from the Trump Foundation. Like Patel, Bondi is a prominent proponent of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. She even spoke at the infamous press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping with Rudy Giuliani.
Installing Bondi and Patel to corrupt federal law enforcement will accelerate America’s descent from a liberal democracy into an authoritarian oligarchy.
If the Republican Senate majority retains any integrity and patriotism, if they value Constitutional democracy and rule law at all, they’d vote down Patel by a large margin. But if you’re waiting for that, I wouldn’t hold my breath.