Trump’s New FBI Director Vows “World’s Largest Manhunt”
Ordinary Americans are in the crosshairs
New FBI Director Kash Patel wants to drop the hammer on threats to the American “way of life.”
On his first full day in office last Friday, Patel vowed to inflict the “full wrath” of the Bureau on “anyone that wishes to do harm to our way of life,” foreign or domestic. Threatening “the world’s largest manhunt,” Patel’s brief statement ended on a chilling note: “we will find you and we will decide your end-state.”
The news media has focused on Patel’s war against the FBI bureaucracy, particularly any agents involved in the Trump-Russia and January 6 investigations, ignoring the host of other perceived evildoers conspiring to undermine Trump’s America.
That includes students and others who have protested against Israel and the war in Gaza; immigrants, “gangs” and “cartels;” Democratic Party functionaries and activists; and even trans Americans, all of whom are connected in the Trump conspiratorial mindset as a vast plot intent on Making America Un-Great.
Like other federal agencies, the FBI in its field offices and agents across the country are struggling in all the chaos to figure out who they are supposed to focus on and target. Just as the FBI during Biden started some two thousand investigations into January 6 lawbreakers, the FBI during Trump will develop their own new unified target.
It’s the bureaucratic way of the world.
Patel has in the past seen threats to America in everything from the Democratic Party and the news media to illegal immigration and Hamas, all of which he believes is connected. “The southern border is directly tied, in my opinion, to the war that has been launched by Hamas and Iran,” Patel said in an interview shortly after October 7. “They have been flooding our southern border with foreign terrorist organization affiliates,” he added.
Major media coverage of Patel has tended to focus on how “unqualified” he is, a criticism that ignores his many years of experience relevant to prosecution and counterterrorism. This includes:
2014-2017: Trial attorney in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, focusing on counterterrorism and serving as a liaison to the Joint Special Operations Command,
2017-2018: Senior counsel on counterterrorism and aide to Rep. Devin Nunes
2019-2020: Senior director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and
2020: Chief of Staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller
You don’t have to like the guy to see that he has some knowledge of how the national security bureaucracy works and how to leverage it.
Senate Democrats presiding over Patel’s nomination have also focused almost exclusively on Patel’s supposed lack of qualifications. To the extent that they’ve had anything to say at all about the threat he might pose to ordinary Americans, the Democrats have fixated on the firing of senior executives in the FBI or the treatment of personnel at the Bureau’s Washington headquarters.
The day of Patel’s confirmation vote, Democratic Senators on the Judiciary Committee — which oversees the FBI — staged a bizarre, crowd-free protest at the Bureau’s headquarters. (Would you believe it failed?) This Bureaucracy First mentality overlooks the hundreds of millions of Americans whose lives are also affected by who the FBI Director is.
In his confirmation hearing before the Senate, Patel testified that he believed the terror threat to the U.S. is “as high as I’ve ever seen it.” The national security state is largely behind him, with the new 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment projecting a high threat of terrorism in the U.S., including domestic terrorism increasingly motivated by partisan political views.
You wouldn’t know it from the avalanche of news articles depicting Patel as a red-nosed clown in way over his head. But having served in the national security system over a longer period of time than I’ve been a reporter, he knows how the bureaucracy goes off on its own and how it works.
There’s still time to pay more attention to what the FBI actually does rather than the travails of its employees. That will be my focus.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
OK, he was a trial attorney, but he was given a letter of incompetence by a judge and eventually fired.
Less tin foil hat and more journalism please.