His first selection for attorney general collapsed in spectacular fashion. His choice for defense secretary is awash in scandal. His picks for intelligence, health and other posts are being panned. But if anyone thought that President-elect Donald J. Trump might be chastened, he has quickly demonstrated otherwise.
Even with so many appointees already under fire, Mr. Trump has doubled down on defiance as he assembles his next administration. Rather than turning to more credentialed and respected choices with easier paths to Senate confirmation, Mr. Trump in rapid-fire fashion keeps naming more ideological warriors, conspiracy theorists and now even family members to senior government positions.
Most striking is his decision to push out the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, a career law enforcement veteran he himself appointed in his first term, and turn the nation’s premier investigative agency over to Kash Patel, who calls himself an avenger against the supposed “deep state.” Mr. Patel, seen as a provocateur of the first order, was widely considered a disruptive force and even dangerous by other Trump advisers who spent much of the last administration trying to keep him out of positions of power.
While attention focused on Mr. Patel, Mr. Trump over the weekend also named the fathers-in-law of two of his children to important jobs. He announced that he would nominate Charles Kushner, the father of Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, and a felon pardoned by Mr. Trump at the end of his last term, to be ambassador to France. And he tapped Massad Boulos, the father of Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, to be his White House senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
The persistence in advancing unconventional appointments underscores how determined Mr. Trump is to surround himself this time with loyalists he can trust to carry out his agenda, including “retribution” against his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump has accused President Biden of using the Justice Department and F.B.I. to come after him, although there is no evidence that Mr. Biden was involved in the cases of the last few years.
Mr. Trump’s contentious selections also represent something of a dare to Senate Republicans to see how far they will go in standing against other nominees they view as unqualified after helping to torpedo former Representative Matt Gaetz’s selection as attorney general.
“By insisting on highly provocative nominees, short on traditional qualifications but long on personal loyalty and zest for confrontation, he seems to be deliberately testing the Senate’s capacity and willingness to play its constitutional role as a check on the president,” said Gregg Nunziata, a former chief nominations counsel for Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans.
At least some Republican senators are already uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s selections of Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services. But the history of Washington confirmations suggests they can focus opposition on one or, at most, a limited number of problematic nominees from a president of their own party, especially a president who punishes dissidents.
In some ways, Mr. Trump appears to be following a sort of swarm strategy, flooding the Senate with many contentious nominations that might not pass muster in normal circumstances and forcing the incoming Republican majority to choose which, if any, to block and which to let through.
His announcement of Mr. Patel, for instance, came shortly after the revelation that Mr. Hegseth’s own mother once accused him of “abusive behavior” toward women in an angry email that she now says she regrets and insists was not true. Mr. Hegseth has separately been accused of raping a woman in 2017, which he strongly denies.
In that context, Republican senators may have little appetite to worry, for instance, about sending Mr. Kushner to Paris, despite the nepotism and his guilty plea in 2004 to evading taxes, retaliating against a witness and lying to the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Trump loved to complain about the “Biden Crime Family,” but Mr. Biden never gave government positions to members of his family, much less one who was actually a convicted criminal.
Mr. Kushner, a real estate developer, served two years behind bars before being released in 2006 and was later pardoned by Mr. Trump, for whom he raised money during the latest campaign. If confirmed, Mr. Kushner would be the first American to go from a bunk at the Federal Prison Camp Montgomery in Alabama to the Hôtel de Pontalba, the lavish 60,000-square-feet ambassadorial residence in Paris.
The lightning rod among Mr. Trump’s latest selections is certainly Mr. Patel, a 44-year-old former congressional aide who joined the Trump administration, bounced from one job to another and has been a vocal defender of the president-elect in the four years since leaving office. Few people in Mr. Trump’s first term stirred as much visceral enmity among his colleagues as Mr. Patel, who was seen as a schemer and loyalty enforcer going around others in the administration.
Knowing that confirmation might be tough, some of Mr. Trump’s advisers had expected Mr. Patel to be made deputy F.B.I. director, a position that does not require Senate approval. In scotching that idea and deciding to put Mr. Patel up for the directorship, Mr. Trump indicated his eagerness to challenge Washington rather than defer to it.
“Kash is totally unqualified for this position. He is the dictionary definition of a sycophant,” said Charles M. Kupperman, who served as deputy national security adviser and was among those who blocked Mr. Patel from becoming what he called a “commissar” in the White House. “Appointing Kash as F.B.I. director is Trump’s ultimate statement that his second term will be driven by retribution. And it is a gross insult to citizens.”
Mr. Patel has accused the F.B.I. of conspiring against Mr. Trump and vowed that if he were in charge, “I’d shut down the F.B.I. Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.” He echoed Mr. Trump’s lies about election fraud in 2020 and vowed that “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.” At another point, he said, “I am going to go on a government gangster’s manhunt in Washington, D.C., for our great president.”
He has also promoted diet supplements and products purporting to reverse negative effects of the Covid-19 vaccine. At one point he pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying in the classified documents case against Mr. Trump, which could make him the first F.B.I. director to have invoked his right against self-incrimination before taking the job.
“Trump’s selection of Patel is a giant thumb in the eye of the Justice Department, the F.B.I. — and the Senate,” said Michael R. Bromwich, who was a Justice Department inspector general under President Bill Clinton. “Patel has no respect for the F.B.I. and is the captive of ridiculous conspiracy theories. He is not a serious candidate and should have a difficult time being confirmed.”
That thumb in the eye is what appeals to Mr. Trump and his supporters. The fact that the president-elect is pushing for nominees who upset Washington traditionalists is part of the appeal to many supporters, an indication that he is following through on promises to shake up a supposedly corrupt and elitist nation’s capital.
Some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal Republican supporters in the Senate rallied behind Mr. Patel on Sunday’s talk shows.
“Kash Patel is a very strong nominee to take on the partisan corruption in the F.B.I.,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
Senator Martha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said that Mr. Patel had a “well rounded background” and that she would support him. “The American people want President Trump’s cabinet nominees to be confirmed,” she said on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News.
Vice President-elect JD Vance came to Mr. Patel’s defense after John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who has broken with the president-elect, said that “Trump has nominated Kash Patel to be his Lavrenty Beria,” a reference to Stalin’s chief of the secret police in the Soviet Union. “John Bolton has been wrong about everything,” Mr. Vance wrote online, “so I guess Kash must be pretty awesome.”
The decision to install Mr. Patel at the F.B.I. goes against the grain of efforts to insulate the bureau from partisan politics ever since the Watergate scandal. Congress decided that the F.B.I. director should serve for a 10-year term, not be replaced by each new president, specifically to avoid White House interference in criminal investigations.
Mr. Trump violated that tradition once already when he fired the F.B.I. director James B. Comey in 2017 after growing angry at the bureau’s investigation of ties between his campaign and Russia during the 2016 election season. He replaced Mr. Comey with Mr. Wray, a well-respected Republican former prosecutor, but grew frustrated with the new director for resisting pressure to politicize the bureau.
Mr. Biden stuck with tradition by keeping Mr. Wray on for all four years of his administration, even though the director had been appointed by his predecessor and rival. Mr. Wray has nearly three years left in his term, so to replace him Mr. Trump would have to fire him or force him to resign.
“Since the 1970s, the D.O.J. and F.B.I. had worked hard to create and maintain a culture of investigative independence free of political influence from the White House,” said Douglas M. Charles, a historian of the F.B.I. at Penn State and the author or editor of several books on the bureau. “This is why we have a 10-year term for the director. If Trump gets his choice for attorney general and Patel as F.B.I. director, all of that is threatened.”
Mr. Trump is making sure to turn over all the levers of the government’s prosecution power to loyalists. After Mr. Gaetz was forced to withdraw his nomination, Mr. Trump named Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who was a defense counsel for him at one of his impeachment trials and has parroted his false claims about the 2020 election. He has also tapped three of his defense attorneys from his criminal cases to take senior Justice Department positions.
The cumulative impact of that could transform the nation’s justice system, Mr. Charles said. “Bondi could alter investigative guidelines and Patel could easily do Trump’s bidding,” he said. “What would stop them? Will F.B.I. officials and agents blindly comply? Only a resistant Congress could prevent it with the Senate’s confirmation powers and the power of the purse.”
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