OPINION — “The FBI’s footprint has gotten so freaking big and the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and open it the next day as a museum of the Deep State. And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for?”
This was Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be FBI Director, speaking to Shawn Ryan in an interview for the latter’s podcast released in September. The interview ran for more than an hour and a half and has garnered 973,000 views on YouTube.
My interest in Patel and his plans for the FBI are more than passing. I have written about the FBI and its directors for more than 60 years.
In 1959, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was the subject of the first story I ever wrote that was printed in The Washington Post. It was a freelance article in The Post’s Sunday Outlook section about how Hoover got Congress to fund five armored limousines over five years which he placed in big cities around the country. Hoover then offered them for use by Presidents when they traveled to those cities, thereby saving money for the White House and gaining favors for Hoover.
In 1971, as a Post reporter, I wrote the first story about the fact that the FBI building under construction would be named for Hoover, and later I worked with NBC News on a segment that featured the first visual representation of the FBI building based on plans I had obtained from the General Services Administration.
Patel’s flip statements about closing down the Hoover Building “on day one” got me thinking about the many questions he ought to be asked – based on what he said during the Shawn Ryan interview alone – when, or if, he eventually appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing next year.
Trump’s FBI plans
President-elect Trump, during his appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, refused to answer directly whether he was “going to fire the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, who you appointed?” Wray’s 10-year term as director does not end until 2027, and to date Wray has not indicated he plans to resign.
During Trump’s Sunday interview he played cute in discussing Wray, saying “I can’t say I’m thrilled with him. He invaded my home,” a reference to the FBI’s getting a judicial warrant to search Mar-a-Lago for classified federal government documents taken from the White House at the end of Trump’s first term in office. The documents were found and became a basis for one of the federal indictments of Trump, now set aside since his election victory.
But as for firing Wray, Trump added, “I don’t want to say — I don’t want to, again, I don’t want to be Joe Biden and give you an answer and then do the exact opposite.”
Trump did agree that he would “have to fire him [Wray] in order to make room for Kash Patel,” and that “it would sort of seem pretty obvious that if Kash gets in, he’s going to be taking somebody’s place, right? Somebody is the man that you’re talking about.”
Who is Kash Patel?
Patel, 44, has worked as a Public Defender in Florida, in the Justice Department on national security cases, on Capitol Hill as a House investigator, and for Trump at the National Security Council.
Beyond the resume, let’s look at Patel, starting with his remarks above, that the 7,000 FBI employees in the Hoover Building are “just cops,” and should be “sent across America to chase down criminals” involved with murders and rapes. Doesn’t Patel, with his many years in the Justice Department, know that the FBI normally deals with federal crimes, not state and local crimes such as murder and rape?
He also should be asked about the FBI reforms in the post-9/11 period, when – after being accused of “not connecting the dots” – the Bureau expanded it intelligence analytic capabilities in order to gather all the bits of information flowing into local and foreign offices into assessments and even actionable planning to prevent terrorist and even some criminal plots before they are carried out.
Since September 2005, by presidential directive, this restructuring has taken another step forward with the creation of the National Security Branch, which consolidated FBI counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and intelligence responsibilities into a single “agency within an agency.”
Patel ought to be asked what he actually knows about the mission of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence, and explain why it has become what he described as the Bureau’s “biggest problem.”
Just last February, FBI Director Wray outlined the Bureau’s new intelligence program strategy. He said, “Our ability to collect intelligence that illuminates threats, to act on that intelligence here in the United States, and to share that intelligence with private companies, law enforcement, the IC, and foreign partners empowers all of us to take the joint action we need to have the greatest impact against the threats we face.”
Loose with the facts?
Another area for Senators in their questioning of Patel should include his habit of telling half-truths, or giving total misstatements about past events.
For example, during the Ryan interview, Patel said the following: “Remember the whole hack from Russia, another disinformation campaign, that said Russia [in 2016] hacked the DNC [Democratic National Committee] to try to rig the election for Donald Trump. [Former FBI Director James] Comey gave the servers from the DNC to CrowdStrike [a private cyber security firm] to exploit. Have you ever heard of a time the FBI surrendered its investigation to a private entity and didn’t conduct its own surveillance and exploitation of that data? I interrogated Shawn Henry [Crowd Strike’s president] and 65 other people under oath during Russia-gate and we were unable to declassify his testimony for years so the narrative of the DNC was attacked by Russia was out there. What did Shawn Henry say now it’s declassified: ‘We didn’t find any evidence to support that.’”
First of all, Henry, in his released testimony, did say that Russia was behind the DNC data breach. Even Patel’s own House Intelligence Committee report said, in Finding # 7, “Russia conducted cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions in 2015-2016,” but did not name the DNC. In Finding #8 it found that “Russian-state actors and third-party intermediaries were responsible for the dissemination of documents and communications stolen from U.S. political organizations,” again not naming the DNC.
As for Patel’s claim that it was unusual for the FBI to give CrowdStrike the DNC servers, Henry testified to Patel’s committee that it was common for organizations to hire third-party industry experts, like CrowdStrike, to have the servers so that the Bureau could investigate and remediate cyber systems when they had been breached.
Henry also testified that he often exchanged information with the FBI, and had even given the FBI a copy of the malware CrowdStrike had found on the servers, since the FBI was doing its own investigation of the Russian hacking of the DNC.
Patel and the “Deep State”
Judiciary Committee Senators should also question Patel about his obsession with the “Deep State.” At one point during the Ryan interview, Patel described his view of the Deep State as “people who’ve been around 10, 20, 30 years in Washington,” many in government, “who know they’re going to benefit from each other if they sign up for the program…Not a Republican or Democrat thing, 65 names just to show how expansive the Deep State is.”
The names Patel referred to are listed as an appendix to Patel’s 2022 book, Government Gangsters.
“There is no like one chain-of-command they [the Deep State members] report to,” Patel said, “instead, what I believe they do is they bring in people that they can control.”
During Sunday’s Meet the Press interview,Trump was asked, “Do you want Kash Patel to launch investigations into people on that list?” Trump replied, “No. I mean, he’s going to do what he thinks is right, adding, “If they think that somebody was dishonest or crooked or a corrupt politician, I think he probably has an obligation to do it.”
Trump was then reminded he had said in a June 12, 2023 Truth Social post, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States, Joe Biden — and the entire Biden family.” Asked if he were going to do that, Trump replied, “That’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [his Attorney General choice] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved.”
At this point Trump said, “I’m not looking to go back into the past. I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”
Actually, Patel, during his Shawn Ryan interview at one point used retribution in a similar way, when discussing his plans for the 51 former national security officials who signed the letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop possibly being a Russian operation. “Everyone of those guys lied, every one of those guys got caught lying,” Patel said to Ryan. “You’re talking about two former CIA Directors, a former NSA Director and a former Secretary of Defense. All intentionally to this day continue to lie and won’t take back their letter,” he added.
Patel’s idea? “Permanently suspend their security clearances forever.”
As Patel explained it, “Security clearances, they use that… in the private sector and you know they use that to get seven- and eight-figure paydays to get big government contracts, to go for big defense contracting and intelligence firms.” He added, “I’ve recommended that to him [Trump]…I want him to do that because it’s justified, it’s not an act of vengeance…I think he will, but it will be up to him and his DNI [Director of National Intelligence].”
A new era
We clearly have entered a new governmental age where there is little attempt to separate the White House from the federal criminal justice system. And the idea that Patel, as a potential FBI Director, has been a close political associate and advisor of Trump, presents a threat not seen since the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
On Sunday, Trump said that Liz Cheney should go to jail for her actions on the House January 6 House Committee, based on his unproven claim “they deleted and destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony…I think those people committed a major crime.”
When Trump was asked, “Are you going to direct your FBI director and your attorney general to send them to jail,” he replied, “No. No, not at all. I think that they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill.”
The words that ring most true to me about that answer are: “I think that they’ll have to look at that.”
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