Washington (AP)Within Donald Trump’s inner circle, Kash Patel has long been recognized as a devoted follower who shares the president-elect’s mistrust of the FBI and intelligence establishment. But now that Trump has chosen him to head the FBI, he is getting new attention from both the public and Congress.
Patel may anticipate criticism for his stated loyalty to Trump as well as his belief—expressed in interviews and his own book over the past year—that the century-old FBI should undergo a fundamental revamp as he prepares for a painful and probably drawn-out Senate confirmation battle.
Here are some of his suggestions for the top federal law enforcement organization in the country. It’s another matter entirely how much of it he would actually carry out.
He has considered closing the FBI’s headquarters in Washington.
Fifty years ago, the FBI’s initial staff moved into the present headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Since then, the executives and supervisors who make choices that impact offices both domestically and abroad have been housed in the building.
However, if Patel gets his way, the J. Edgar Hoover Building might be closed, and its staff would be scattered.
I d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state, Patel said in a September interview on the Shawn Kelly Show. I would then dispatch the 7,000 workers in that building to hunt out criminals across the United States. Act like police officers. Go be cops, you are cops.
Legal, logistical, and bureaucratic challenges would surely be necessary for such a strategy, and it might be more of a rhetorical flourish than a realistic goal.
In a book last year titled, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy, he proposed a more modest reform of having the headquarters moved out of Washington to prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship.
As it turns out, the building’s long-term destiny is uncertain regardless of the change in leadership. The General Services Administration last year selected Greenbelt, Maryland, as the site for a new headquarters, butcurrent FBI Director Christopher Wrayhas raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the site selection process.
He s talked about finding conspirators in the government and media
In an interview last year with conservative strategist Steve Bannon, Patel repeatedfalsehoodsabout President Joe Biden and a stolen election.
We re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections, Patel said. The same applies for supposed conspirators inside the federal government, he said.
Although his exact goals are unclear, Patel appears to be reversing the Justice Department’s current policy, which normally forbids prosecutors from seizing the records of journalists involved in leak investigations, in order to facilitate government crackdowns on officials who reveal sensitive information and the reporters who obtain it.
That policy was implemented in 2021 by Attorney General Merrick Garland following an uproar over the revelation that the Justice Department during the Trump administration had obtained phone records of reportersas part of investigations into who had disclosed government secrets.
Patel himself has said that it s yet to be determined whether such a crackdown would be done civilly or criminally. His book includes several pages of former officials from the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies he s identified as being part of the Executive Branch Deep State.
Under the FBI s own guidelines, criminal investigations can t be rooted in arbitrary or groundless speculation but instead must have an authorized purpose to detect or interrupt criminal activity.
And while the FBI conducts investigations, the responsibility of filing federal charges, or bringing a lawsuit on behalf of the federal government, falls to the Justice Department. Trump intends to nominate former Florida attorney generalPam Bondias attorney general.
He wants major, major surveillance reform
Patel has been a fierce critic of the FBI s use of its surveillance authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and in his Shawn Kelly Show interview, called for major, major reform. Tons.
That position aligns him with both left-leaning civil libertarians who have long been skeptical of government power and Trump supporters outraged bywell-documented surveillance misstepsduring the FBI s investigation intopotential ties between Russia and Trump s 2016 campaign.
But it sets him far apart from FBI leadership, which has stressed the need for the bureau to retain its ability to spy on suspected spies and terrorists even while also implementing corrective steps meant to correct past abuses.
If confirmed, Patel would take over the FBI amid continued debate over a particularly contentious provision of FISA known as Section 702, which permits the U.S. to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence.
Biden in April signed a two-year extension of the authorityfollowing a fierce congressional dispute centered on whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans data. Though the FBI boasts a high compliance rate, analysts have been blamed for a series of abuses and mistakes, including improperly querying the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including amember of Congressand participants in theracial justice protests of 2020and theJan. 6, 2021, riotat the U.S. Capitol.
Patel has made clear his disdain for the reauthorization vote.
Because the budget of FISA was up this cycle, we demanded Congress fix it. And do you know what the majority in the House, where the Republicans did? They bent the knee. They (reauthorized) it, Patel said.
In his book, Patel said a federal defender should be present to argue for the rights of the accused at all FISA court proceedings, a departure from the status quo.
He has called for reducing the size of the intelligence community
Patel has advocated cutting the federal government s intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency.
When it comes to the FBI, he said last year that he would support breaking off the bureau s intel shops from the rest of its crime-fighting activities.
It s not clear exactly how he would intend to do that given that the FBI s intelligence-gathering operations form a core part of the bureau s mandate and budget. Wray, who s been in the job for seven years, has alsorecently warned of a heightened threat environmentrelated to international and domestic terrorism.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller faced down calls from some in Congress who thought the FBI should be split up, with a new domestic intelligence agency created in its wake.
The idea died, and Mueller committed new resources into transforming what for decades had been primarily a domestic law enforcement agency into an intelligence-gathering institution equally focused on combating terrorism, spies and foreign threats.
Frank Montoya Jr., a retired senior FBI official who served as director of the office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, said he disagreed with the idea of breaking out the FBI s intel shops and viewed it as a way to defang the bureau.
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