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José Luis Villegas

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of uber-loyalist Kash Patel to be FBI director is a hair-on-fire moment. Trump is poised to install a team of toadies at the Justice Department — a flotilla of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/28/todd-blanche-donald-trump-justice-attorney-general/" target=_blank>his criminal defense lawyers</a> but most ominously an attorney general, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/21/matt-gaetz-senate-trump-cabinet/" target=_blank>Pam Bondi</a>, who has vowed that “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/23/pam-bondi-doj-attorney-general-trump-pick/" target=_blank>the prosecutors will be prosecuted</a>,” and now, with Patel, an FBI director who would add journalists to that list.

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/30/trump-kash-patel-fbi-director/" target=_blank>Patel said</a> of Trump’s plans in a 2023 podcast with Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly — we’ll figure that out.”

Republican senators — enough of them, anyway — did their constitutional duty in balking at former congressman Matt Gaetz, Trump’s clownish first choice to serve as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Now, unpleasant and politically perilous as it might be, they must stand up to Trump again.

The Senate, and the country, needs to hear Bondi and Patel explain themselves, because responsible law enforcement officials do not talk like this, with claims of criminal retribution against their perceived enemies. “The investigators will be investigated,” Bondi told Fox News last year.

Patel is particularly worrisome. Don’t listen to me; listen to Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr, who objected to Trump’s first-term efforts to install Patel in the No. 2 job at the FBI. In his memoir, Barr said he told then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would get the deputy job “over my dead body.”

Patel, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-names-loyalist-kash-patel-serve-fbi-director-116342190" target=_blank>Barr wrote</a>, “had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency. The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality.”

Patel debuted in Trumpland when, as an adviser to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California), <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/30/kash-patel-fbi-director-nominee-trump/" target=_blank>he wrote a memo</a> arguing that the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election was politically motivated. Subsequently, he held various roles in the first Trump administration, from serving on the National Security Council to advising both the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense.

It’s important to understand that a new president picking the FBI director of his preference is not the norm — it is an aberration, and a dangerous one. Presidents are generally entitled to political appointees of their choosing, but the FBI director is supposed to be insulated from politics. That is one reason the director is appointed to a single 10-year term, spanning two administrations.

A president can fire the FBI director, but until Trump, that had happened <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/07/20/clinton-fires-sessions-as-fbi-director/1c1b437e-a695-48d0-bc9e-afa5f0f69b79/" target=_blank>only once</a>, when President Bill Clinton <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/07/20/clinton-fires-sessions-as-fbi-director/1c1b437e-a695-48d0-bc9e-afa5f0f69b79/?tid=a_inl-amp&utm_term=.3fc9cceda560" target=_blank>removed</a> William S. Sessions in 1993 over ethics lapses. The circumstances of that removal underscore its extraordinary nature: It occurred only after the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded a lengthy report, released at the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, and only after months of the new administration agonizing over how to deal with Sessions.

In announcing the move, Clinton said he and Attorney General Janet Reno “agreed that, in the normal course of events, the director of the FBI should not be changed just because administrations change … perhaps even especially when there’s a change of political party in the White House.”

Even then, the action triggered criticism. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas) <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1993/07/20/clinton-fires-defiant-fbi-director-sessions/" target=_blank>called the firing</a> “a potentially worrisome precedent” that “should concern every American who values the political independence of our nation’s top law enforcement agencies.”

Then came Trump, who, four months into his first term, fired James B. Comey in the midst of the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s action came after a private dinner with Comey a week after the inauguration at which, Comey wrote in his memoir, the new president told the director, “<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/comey-book-claims-president-trump-sought-loyalty-mafia/story?id=54420635" target=_blank>I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.</a>”

Trump replaced Comey with Christopher A. Wray, who, predictably, incurred Trump’s ire during his first term and who — after having been kept on by President Joe Biden — Trump now plans to remove if Wray does not leave on his own.

Welcome to life under Trump: What once was shocking now seems ordinary.

Never in the history of the FBI — it was created in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation — has there been a director anything like Patel. He poses a double threat: both a crony of the president and an unstinting critic of the institution he has been tapped to lead.

“Unstinting” might be understated. In his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters,” Patel wrote, “The rot at the core of the FBI isn’t just scandalous, it’s an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He calls the bureau “one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State” and a “tool of surveillance and suppression of American citizens.” Patel describes “the political jackals at the FBI” and recommends getting rid of its headquarters. Putting someone like Patel at the helm of the FBI would be beyond reckless. Patel’s book includes a helpful appendix listing 60 members of the deep state — “not including the entire fake news mafia press corps.”

Couple that with Patel’s allegiance to Trump. “Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion,” the Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/kash-patel-trump-national-security-council/679566/" target="_blank">wrote in</a> an August profile. “We’re blessed by God to have Donald Trump be our juggernaut of justice, to be our leader, to be our continued warrior in the arena,” <a href="https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2024/kash-patel-is-pushing-conspiracies-and-his-brand-hes-poised-to-help-lead-a-trump-administration/" target="_blank">Patel told</a> the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. He was a presence on the campaign trail.

Meantime, Patel is doing well by serving Trump. He <a href="https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2024/kash-patel-is-pushing-conspiracies-and-his-brand-hes-poised-to-help-lead-a-trump-administration/" target="_blank">sits on the board</a> of the company that owns Truth Social and has received more than $300,000 in consulting fees from Trump’s leadership PAC, along with $145,000 for fundraising consulting for Gaetz in 2021.

In her Atlantic piece, Calabro quoted a longtime Trump adviser about the president-elect’s views of Patel: “A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump had said, according to the adviser. “<i>I</i> think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”

No. Not at the FBI. Senators, do your jobs.

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for commentary, 2007

Yale College

Harvard Law School

Ruth Marcus is an associate editor and columnist for The Post.

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Kash Patel is a dangerous and unqualified pick for the FBI

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