Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director
He wants to "take a wrecking ball to the Deep State." Here's how
Donald Trump last night announced his nomination of Kash Patel for FBI Director. The choice triggered a frenzy of media commentary labeling the former public defender, prosecutor, congressional aide, and Trump administration intelligence and defense deputy as a dangerous “loyalist” and conspiracy theorist. Absent from this coverage is what specifically Patel would actually do as head of the FBI, so I took a look at his memoir and past interviews to find out.
Major media portray Patel as a Joker-fied firebrand hellbent on exploding the national security state. This sort of coverage is free advertising for Trump, who campaigned on upending the status quo and now has to deliver. Patel embraces the firebrand image with theatrical proposals that evoke Trump’s bombast. “I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building [its headquarters] on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” Patel said in a September interview with YouTuber Shawn Ryan. Bold as this might sound, Patel in the next sentence makes clear that it would be largely symbolic.
“And I'd take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals,” he adds. In other words, the same Washington officials would simply go on to work at the Bureau’s over 50 other field offices across the country. Nothing would fundamentally change, to quote one of Patel’s nemeses.
His showy-but-symbolic plan for FBI headquarters is a nice metaphor for his other proposed reforms, detailed in his memoir released last year, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”
“Whether through Congress or the president,” he says in his book, the reason why the FBI headquarters should be removed from Washington is “to prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship.” Patel’s proposals revolve around his view that Washington is the problem, particularly what he calls the “deep state.”
One solution, Patel argues in his book, is for Congress to aggressively subpoena documents and witnesses from the national security state to uncover wrongdoing. This includes the formation of a new Church Commission, modeled after the congressional body that uncovered CIA crimes like MKULTRA and spying operations on the civil rights movement. “If the bureaucracy resists, the strategy of fencing should be much more commonly used to withhold appropriated funds until agencies comply with congressional requests.”
Patel is right that Congress could force these agencies to be more transparent by simply threatening to withhold funding. But what he wants them to be transparent about is a frustratingly small-bore list of partisan grievances and Washington figures most people don’t know or care about. A list of members of Patel’s deep state appears in his memoir, including the likes of Lisa Page, Peter Stzok, Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Orr, and the all powerful Hillary Clinton. I could barely give a shit about most of these figures during the Mueller investigation, much less now!
Patel’s theory of reform fixates on these weird personal grievances with individuals who are now largely irrelevant instead of the broader system of national security which I think most people agree needs to be upended. His entire memoir is based upon the premise that the FBI is all about FISA surveillance of Trump advisors and the Steele Dossier and the quest to prove collusion between Donald Trump and Russia. What about the rest of the country, like law-abiding protesters on both the left and right that have been surveilled? Or all of us who have to live through the consequences of the FBI’s intelligence failures, from 9/11 to January 6, for which no one is ever fired?
There’s a tragic element to Patel — who defines himself by his opposition to Washington — remaining so fixated on political figures nobody outside Washington knows about. When asked by Ryan, the YouTuber, to define the deep state, Patel replies:
“The Obamas still have heavy sway in that entire operation, and so do people that have been around for 10, 20, 30 years in Washington…I think there’s like 65 people I name, by title and name, just to show people how expansive the Deep State is.”
The Department of Homeland Security alone employs over 200,000 people, millions more have security clearances, and Patel is obsessing over a few dozen people who are over-the-hill and busying themselves writing doorstop memoirs titled, like, “A Sacred Loyalty: My Life of Service and Sacrifice.”
Patel calls for “Civil Service Reform” to deal with this “deep state.” He writes:
“[Trump] should reinstitute Schedule F, a Trump administration policy creating a new classification for federal employees that made it easier to fire them if they subverted the president’s agenda. Additionally, Congress must change the law to allow federal bureaucrats to be able to be fired by the president.”
He also calls for harsher treatment of leakers:
“The Department of Justice has the forensic capabilities to discover leakers. Every single one of them should be found and prosecuted for violating federal law. Additionally, government employees should be required to sign NDAs, subjecting themselves to criminal prosecution for violating the requirement that already exists that all government devices (including cellphones, laptops, and more) can be used for authorized government work only. Then, those devices should be subjected to mandatory monthly scans across the entire federal government to determine who has improperly transferred classified information, including to the press.”
The problem with all of this — besides suggesting a new FBI to monitor the FBI — is that Patel is so singularly focused on the supposed politically relevant work of the Bureau, he cannot see that this is basically only one percent of what the FBI actually does. Patel focuses on the “centralization of power” as the problem, but is also suggesting some countervailing centralized power to root it out. He wants to fight fire with fire — or politicization with more politicization.
Patel does say in his book that he wants to “cut the size of the intel community,” something I wholeheartedly agree with in principle. He writes:
“The number of staff at ODNI [office of the director of national intelligence] and throughout the intelligence community, including the CIA and the NSA, must be drastically reduced to eliminate duplicative offices and cut down on information and the practice of stovepiping — where intelligence officials funnel important information directly up to the agency heads without sharing it with others. Intelligence agencies must be refocused on ground-level intelligence gathering.”
But the reason their budget needs to be trimmed is not because of intelligence sharing issues. The mundane reality concealed by Hollywood spy thrillers is that much of what the intelligence community produces is a Niagara of useless junk, the kind of management emails you get at work: professional-sounding but which say nothing and you quickly scan past. If you don’t believe me, take a look at past intelligence leaks and see what percent of their contents surprise you. It’s not zero, but it’s close.
Patel is angry about being a target of an FBI investigation; I guess we’ll find out if he actually was. And why. Outside of his bitter analysis that everything is politically motivated, he actually has surprisingly little to say about what are the true problems at the Bureau and inside the intelligence community.
All of this reminds me of the January 6 protesters who broke into the Capitol building and then just milled around aimlessly, posing with the Speaker’s lectern and taking selfies inside the Senate chamber and Rotunda. They say they want radical change, but clearly have no clue what that even looks like. Will Kash Patel mill about Washington? It sounds to me that he doesn’t really know what he wants or how to implement what the public does. He’s all about his personal agenda, the very definition of “political.”
— Edited by William M. Arkin
I'm no fan of Trump, but he has very good grounds for suspicion of the FBI and some of the highly questionable activities they undertook during his administration. The abuse of FISA warrants in particular merits serious attention. A new Church style Commission focused on the FBI (rather than the CIA) would actually be a healthy corrective, although it's hard to believe that Patel himself has the expertise to handle this correctly.
Confirmation hearings are going to be must see TV.