Critics of President-elect Donald Trump nominee to lead the FBI they expressed doubts that he is fit to lead the main law enforcement agency in the US government.
Others have also raised fears that Kash Patel, a former member of Trump’s first administration who is known for his loyalty, intends to dismantle the political establishment’s security service and turn it into a means of partial revenge.
“Look, 99.9% of the bureau has hard-working agents who adhere to the principles of honesty, courage and integrity,” said Jeff Lanza, a former FBI agent. “But it is said that he will come in to finish the agency. How will that go and how will that affect the behavior of the agents who must work under him?”
The FBI director leads 37,000 employees in 55 US bureaus. They also oversee 350 satellite offices and more than 60 foreign locations expected to cover nearly 200 countries.
Former FBI and Justice Department officials who spoke to the BBC said the job was difficult, and it was unlikely that someone like Patel, with limited management experience, would be successful.
Gregory Brower, former assistant director of the FBI and deputy general counsel who worked closely with the previous two directors, called the job “unstoppable”.
“It is uncompromising. It is very high. It requires professional judgement, tenacity, experience, and a strong moral and ethical compass,” he told the BBC.
In announcing his choice for FBI director, Trump called Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ warrior who has spent his career exposing corruption, protecting justice, and protecting the American people”.
Patel began his career as a public defender in Miami before serving as a terrorism prosecutor at the Department of Justice between 2014 and 2017. He then spent two years as a senior aide to the Republicans who led the House Intelligence Committee, reportedly fighting the Trump investigation. and Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, he was hired as a staff member of Trump’s National Security Council. In February 2020, he became the principal deputy in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – then headed by acting director Richard Grenell.
By November of that year, he had moved to the Pentagon to serve as chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller — a position he held until Trump left office two months later.
“Kash Patel has served in key national security positions across the government. He is unfit to lead the FBI and would make an amazing Director,” Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump Transition Spokesperson, told the BBC.
Patel’s critics cite past FBI directors, many of whom have worked for the Justice Department or the FBI for decades, as a better measure of the qualifications needed to lead the agency.
“It’s certainly not unlike the backgrounds we’ve seen other FBI directors and those who have overseen other agencies of similar caliber and importance bring to their jobs,” Brower said of Patel’s experience.
Others pointed to former US Attorney General Bill Barr’s 2022 memoir of Trump’s attempt to appoint Patel to the top job at the FBI during his first term to underscore this point.
“I was totally against making Patel the deputy director of the FBI. I told Mark Meadows it was going to happen ‘over my dead body,’ ” he wrote. “A person without a background as an agent will never be able to provide the respect necessary to perform the daily duties of the office.”
Since leaving office, Patel has promised in interviews that, if Trump returns to office, he and others will use the government to go after political opponents — including politicians and the media who he accuses without evidence of helping to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. .
“We’re going to go after people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden win the presidential election,” Patel told Steve Bannon, Trump’s first White House strategist, on the War Room podcast.
“We will go after you, whether it is criminal or legal. We will find that. But yes, we are informing you all… We will actually use the Constitution to prosecute them for the crimes they have committed. We said we have always been guilty but we have never had it.”
Trump said during his re-election campaign that he was taking Patel’s book – titled Government Gangsters – as a “blueprint” for his next administration.
In a memoir, criticizing the so-called deep state, Patel calls for a “complete housecleaning” of the FBI for firing “high-ranking” officers.
In a recent podcast, he said that the incoming Trump administration intends to keep about 50 members of the FBI in Washington, and the remaining employees will be placed in the field. Actually, they’re “going to close that building”, he said, referring to FBI headquarters.
“It opened the next day as a museum in a deep state,” he added.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr Grenell and other Trump administration officials who have worked with Patel praised his appointment and described him as a hard-working public servant.
“I have no doubt that Kash Patel will inspire our FBI agents who want to fight crime, destroy cartels, catch spies, and jail criminals, criminals, fraudsters and smugglers,” said Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser. in X.
Few, however, mentioned the current FBI Director, Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump after the former president fired the agency’s last leader – James Comey – or that he has three years left in the post.
Ultimately, it is up to the Senate to vote on whether Patel’s nomination will be confirmed.
While most senators have remained silent on Patel and a few Republicans have praised the choice, there are obvious skeptics.
Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, appeared to raise doubts that he would get the necessary votes.
“I think the president picked the right man to be the director of the FBI when he did that in his first term,” Rounds told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“We’ll see what his (Trump’s) process is, and whether he does it,” Rounds said of Patel. “We’re still going through the process, and that process includes advice and consent, which, in the Senate, means advice or consent sometimes.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, a Democrat who will hand his gavel to Republicans, insisted that Trump knows Wray’s time is not up and asked his colleagues to block Patel’s confirmation.
“Now, the President-elect wants to replace him with someone who is honest,” Durbin said in a statement. “The Senate must reject this unprecedented effort to arm the FBI for the retaliatory campaign promised by Donald Trump.”
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