“Fire the top ranks of the F.B.I.” Encourage Congress to demand testimony exposing “every single bit of filth and corruption” at the agency, and withhold its funding “until the documents come in.” Prosecute leakers and journalists. Replace the national security work force with “people who won’t undermine the president’s agenda.”
These are among a long list of changes Kash Patel recommended in his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters.” President-elect Donald J. Trump has now said he intends to make Mr. Patel the next F.B.I. director.
Mr. Trump had wanted to install Mr. Patel as deputy F.B.I. director during his first term, but Attorney General William P. Barr, who portrayed him as manifestly unqualified in his own memoir, told the White House that Mr. Patel would become deputy F.B.I. director “over my dead body.”
Mr. Barr has since been banished from Mr. Trump’s circle, and Mr. Patel’s book and other past statements are coming under fresh scrutiny as a guide to his aspirations. Some of what he has said is hyperbole, but other things would be within his power should he be confirmed by the Senate.
Charles Kupperman, deputy national security adviser during the first Trump administration, warned that Mr. Patel’s ideas would be anathema to the F.B.I.’s mission.
“The irony of this is that they all complained about the politicization of the F.B.I., and here Trump is putting in someone who’s going to do just that,” Mr. Kupperman said in an interview. “These are not reforms, they are punitive measures from a guy trying to be the enforcer for Trump.”
Investigating Trump’s Political Adversaries
Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to use the Justice Department to “go after” his political adversaries in a second term, an apparent attempt to build on the pressure he put on prosecutors in his first term to open investigations into his enemies. Most notable was the effort by a U.S. attorney, John H. Durham, to try to find a basis to bring charges against the national security officials who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Mr. Durham spent four years pursuing that goal and came up short, but in the meantime he turned his targets’ lives upside down and provided regular fodder for right-wing news outlets.
Mr. Patel would be well positioned to help carry out new investigations.
Although Mr. Patel would need a factual basis for suspecting someone of wrongdoing to open a preliminary or full investigation, department rules give significant discretion to F.B.I. officials to determine whether the standard has been met. If Mr. Patel wanted to open investigations on a flimsy basis, he would need to find subordinates willing to go along. Either way, he would need a Justice Department prosecutor to take more intrusive steps like issuing a grand jury subpoena or seeking a wiretap order.
For those targeted such investigations are highly disruptive, including by creating a need to pay for expensive defense attorneys, even if they never result in charges.
Going After Reporters and Leakers
Mr. Patel has specifically threatened to unleash law enforcement powers on the mainstream news media, which Mr. Trump likes to call “the enemies of the people.” Mr. Patel has echoed that stance.
Mr. Patel has either threatened or filed defamation lawsuits against The New York Times, CNN and Politico for what he wrote was “all the manifold lies they told about me while I worked at the White House.” So far he has not been successful.
But he has not been deterred. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” Mr. Patel said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Currently, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are barred from using compulsory legal processes, like subpoenas and search warrants, to go after reporters’ information, including by asking third parties, like phone and email companies, to turn over their data, or to force them to testify about their sources.
But that limit is in a rule issued by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. Should Mr. Trump’s attorney general rescind that regulation, the F.B.I. would be freed to go after reporters’ information.
Internal guidelines also flatly ban investigating someone on the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment. And there are strict limits around opening investigations into members of Congress or reporters. But an F.B.I. director, especially if there is a like-minded attorney general, could interpret those limits so narrowly as to make them meaningless, or even throw them out.
Mr. Patel has also called for using the Justice Department more aggressively to uncover who in the government is providing information to news reporters, and said that leakers should be prosecuted. He wrote in his book that all federal employees should be forced to submit to monthly scans of their devices “to determine who has improperly transferred classified information, including to the press.”
Purging and Decentralizing the F.B.I. Work Force
Mr. Patel rose in political circles by trying to discredit the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and he holds deep contempt for Justice Department prosecutors, F.B.I. agents and investigators, all of whom he accuses of political corruption.
In a September 2024 podcast, he declared that he would close the F.B.I.’s Washington headquarters and disperse the officials who work there to other parts of the country.
“I’d shut down the F.B.I. Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Mr. Patel said. “And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops.”
The F.B.I. has already started to reduce staffing in its Washington headquarters because of overcrowding, including by building a second headquarters in Alabama. But there are practical obstacles to further decentralizing.
Most of the F.B.I. personnel who work in Washington are not special agents but support staff who are not qualified for law enforcement roles. The F.B.I. also needs a presence in Washington to deal with the rest of the executive branch, especially the Justice Department’s national security division.
That said, the F.B.I. director has broad authority to reassign personnel to different parts of the country.
Not least, Mr. Patel called in his book for weakening civil service job protections for tens of thousands of career officials. That would allow the president to fire them at will and replace them with loyalists. Mr. Trump began that effort at the close of his first term, President Biden canceled it and the Trump team is now planning to revive it.
For Mr. Trump to appoint Mr. Patel as F.B.I. director early next year would also require upending job protections. While presidents can fire F.B.I. directors at will, Congress set the position’s term at 10 years, long enough to outlast any president who made the appointment, to signal that the role is supposed to be above politics. Mr. Trump appointed the current director, Christopher Wray, in 2017, so Mr. Wray would have to quit or be fired to make room for Mr. Patel.
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