President Trump’s pick for F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, is no stranger to controversy. And despite a vigorous Senate hearing on Thursday, he appears to be coasting toward confirmation. The New York Times politics correspondent Michelle Cottle spoke to the journalist and author Garrett Graff on what Patel’s F.B.I. appointment could mean for America, and of all of Trump’s nominees, why Patel is among the most dangerous.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Michelle Cottle: I’m delighted to be joined by journalist and author Garrett Graff to talk about President Trump’s choice to head the F.B.I., Kash Patel, who just had his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.
Tape of Senator Adam Schiff: If an F.B.I. director promoted a song of people who spray pepper spray in the face of an F.B.I. agent, would you say they were fit to be director?
Tape of Kash Patel: Mr. Schiff ——
Tape of Schiff: Yes or no? Would they be fit to be director?
Tape of Patel: I am fit to be the director of the F.B.I.
Despite the long and spicy proceedings, Patel is widely expected to be confirmed, but Garrett has observed that “of all the Trump nominees, Patel ranks among the most dangerous.” OK, that’s ominous.
Garrett, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
Garrett Graff: It’s my pleasure to talk to you anytime.
Cottle: I want to get us started just with what your initial reaction to the hearings was. So just give me your Reader’s Digest, condensed version.
Graff: I think it seems clear that the Republican senators are circling wagons around Kash Patel, and it seemed like the Republican support behind him is strong and that he is coasting toward confirmation.
Cottle: I was struck by how much it felt like those were his defense lawyers there boosting him along. Chuck Grassley, the chairman, put on his best kind of scolding grandpa tone —
Tape of Chuck Grassley: I expect Mr. Patel to be treated fairly by my colleagues who are here today to consider the nomination case for director of the F.B.I.
— to talk about the people who might be criticizing Patel’s record and they did, as you say, circle the wagons.
But I also, like you, went into this thinking he would almost have had to jump up and stab a Republican during the hearing for this to derail his nomination. He is the kind of central, disruptive figure that Trump is looking to to overhaul the deep state. I can’t foresee, or I couldn’t foresee, what was going to stop this.
Graff: Yes, I think also one of the things that we have seen that has united the nominees that are wavering or have withdrawn — like in the case of President Trump’s first attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz — is that they are personally odious. We saw Pete Hegseth really struggle with personal allegations about his behavior. We’ve seen Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really struggle in confirmation hearings because of their personal views or associations. And in Kash Patel’s case, I think he is institutionally worrisome but doesn’t appear to have the sort of troubling personal background that at least bothers the Republicans.
Cottle: Even beyond the hearing, which is theater in these situations, you know an awful lot about the bureau. You’ve been reporting on the F.B.I. for 15 years, you’ve written multiple books, you know this agency. Why is Patel such an unusual choice?
Graff: To me what is so uniquely dangerous about Kash Patel as F.B.I. director is that he represents a complete repudiation of the very specific model of F.B.I. director that we have had in the 50 years since the death of J. Edgar Hoover. At the end of Hoover’s the- 50-year reign at the F.B.I., the F.B.I. had been really perfected by Hoover as a political weapon.
F.B.I. officials sent blackmail tapes and a note encouraging suicide to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They used it to out and punish homosexuals in Washington politics. As Hoover’s full reign of terror became clear in the 1970s, Congress, the Justice Department, the executive branch, the courts, they put in all sorts of new guardrails and protections and oversight capabilities to ensure that the F.B.I. could never be used like that again.
Cottle: That’s why they have the 10-year appointments, right?
Graff: Exactly. F.B.I. directors have been appointed by presidents for a 10-year term, which is very specifically meant to be so that they are removed from day-to-day politics.
Kash Patel comes from an incredibly different place. He is one of the ultimate MAGA loyalists. He has an incredibly thin résumé. He’s younger by a decade than any previous recent F.B.I. director, and he has no management background. He has never held a Senate-confirmed role before. I mean, one of the things that has distinguished every modern F.B.I. director is that they have been through Senate confirmation once before, either to a Justice Department role or to a federal judgeship. Kash Patel, very notably, has been appointed because he is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump.
He hawks merchandise featuring Donald Trump. He was a Trump staffer. He has appeared at Trump political rallies as a speaker, which is just a completely unthinkable black mark for any previous F.B.I. nominee. And he is being appointed with an explicit mission, seemingly from the president, to weaponize the F.B.I. in exactly the way that Hoover used to weaponize it.
Cottle: Now you’ve done a lot of thinking about where this all could go. Earlier this week, you published a newsletter laying out three possible ways in broad strokes. Do you want to walk us through some of those?
Graff: We don’t really know, obviously, how this will unfold. But what I can imagine happening are a couple of different things.
The F.B.I. is an enormously bureaucratic organization; agents joke that the bureaucracy is literally its middle name. So I think that there is one scenario where the building is able to resist some of Kash Patel’s worst impulses. You know, he is remarkably inexperienced and that could work against him, as he tries to both “reform the bureau” and also make it do his bidding and President Trump’s bidding.
There’s another scenario, of course, where Kash Patel succeeds and returns the F.B.I. to the dark ages as a political weapon, as a secret police for the president. It is also an agency that, very uniquely, reveres the role of director and takes orders from the director seriously as they roll down through that big bureaucracy.
And I think Kash Patel’s vision for what the F.B.I. does is particularly dangerous because he has been very clear that he wants the F.B.I. to sort of go back to being cops. Much of its work, particularly post-9/11, has been in the national security realm, but Patel sees the counterintelligence cases, the espionage cases, the counterterrorism cases that it does as being part and parcel of this deep state surveillance state, that he thinks is where the deep state lives, in the F.B.I. Getting rid of that, undoing that, cutting that back, is a recipe for another 9/11. The F.B.I. has done an enormous amount of work, very carefully and very thoughtfully, to build relationships and cooperation and intelligence sharing with the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. — and other intelligence agencies — to combat cyber threats, to combat intelligence threats, to combat counterterrorism threats. Undoing that comes at a pretty steep cost.
Cottle: All of this, to me, then seems to feed into the larger danger that we’ve seen with President Trump, which is when you start undermining the public faith in institutions, then those institutions can’t really function like they’re supposed to. You don’t have people who are willing to share information. You don’t have the ability to hold government officials accountable when they’ve done things that are wrong, because you just claim that the F.B.I. is itself corrupt. And so you continue to destabilize the whole system.
Do you see this going forward, even now that he’s back in charge? I can see him doing it under a Biden administration, but it seems like this could be where we’re headed even under his administration.
Graff: To me, there’s this sort of overarching shame in a lot of Trump’s appointments. With these people that he is putting forward for jobs like attorney general, director of national intelligence, F.B.I. director, it sort of forces you to defend institutions that are actually really in need of reform. Part of the challenge of this is that America could really use a great, thoughtful, nuanced discussion about the F.B.I. surveillance authorities and oversight structure, a quarter-century after 9/11.
Kash Patel is clearly not the person who should be leading that, nor is Kash Patel coming in with a particularly nuanced and thoughtful vision for how to improve the oversight structures of the Office of General Counsel. He’s coming in with a very explicit vision that he returned to in his confirmation hearings, of saying basically: I want to close headquarters entirely on Day 1.
Cottle: But what about oversight down the road — theoretically, is there anything that can be done once Patel is in place, in terms of oversight of the department?
Graff: Once you get into the role, the oversight of the F.B.I. largely falls to the courts and to the Justice Department. To me, the challenge is that the primary check and balance in U.S. government, in U.S. democracy, turns out to be not putting irresponsible people into positions of responsibility.
Cottle: Oh, that’s so unfortunate.
Graff: It is. And that’s putting someone in charge of the F.B.I. who actually cares about the F.B.I.’s independence and cares about their own personal integrity. Right now, we have a lineup of the least qualified, least experienced, most partisan and politically loyal nominees we have ever seen for any of these roles.
Cottle: Taking this down to a more personal level, during his hearing, Patel disavowed a list of enemies that he published in the book “Government Gangsters.” He assured everyone during the hearing that it’s not an enemies list. He said it’s a total mischaracterization. But let’s just say, for argument’s sake, he did want to go after some of these folks for retribution. What could he do? What would be one of the more likely scenarios?
Graff: I think part of this is understanding that the F.B.I. can ruin lives without bringing criminal charges. The F.B.I. can drag you along for a couple of years in an investigation that requires you to spend a couple thousand dollars on legal bills and never goes anywhere, but still destroys your financial security.
Success for Kash Patel in a persecution of a political enemy might just be the visuals of the F.B.I. agents raiding a home or an office and carrying boxes of documents out to personally embarrass and smear people.
To me, the reason that Kash Patel is so uniquely dangerous as F.B.I. director is because this is such a tactical and operational role. There are so many places where Donald Trump is installing dangerously inexperienced people in cabinet roles or agency heads that frankly just don’t do that much operationally day to day and so are somewhat insulated in the actual damage that they can wreak on individual targeted lives.
This is a situation where Kash Patel would be taking over the reins of a position where he can make life incredibly uncomfortable for individual people very quickly.
Cottle: Well, OK, that’s certainly upbeat. Before I let you go, what is it that is keeping you up at night right now?
Graff: It actually has to do with the midair collision that we saw in D.C. I think that that incident crystallizes one of my biggest fears about the Trump era that we are entering, which is government works until it doesn’t and we forget just how hard it is to actually make government work on a day-to-day basis.
The average American shouldn’t actually have to care about who the F.B.I. director is. The fact that this week we are all paying attention to who the inspector general of the Department of Agriculture is is a problem. What I really worry about is how complacent we are as a country about the backdrop of support that the federal government gives to our lives in 1,000 different ways on a daily basis that we have never thought about in living history. Donald Trump’s assault on these institutions undermines those basic protections: clean water, clean air, safe air travel, an F.B.I. that protects us against terrorism.
Cottle: We’re going to have a four-year test of that complacency is what you’re telling me.
Graff: Yes.
Cottle: OK, well, now I’m going to be up at night.
The post Kash Patel as F.B.I. Director Could ‘Destabilize the Whole System’ appeared first on New York Times.
