It goes almost without saying that Kash Patel, whom Donald Trump picked over the weekend to lead the F.B.I., is supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.
That’s what even those who know Mr. Patel well are saying: “He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy,” his supervisor in the first Trump administration, Charles Kupperman, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.” Mr. Kupperman’s view is hardly an outlier: In Mr. Trump’s first term, both Bill Barr, then the attorney general, and Gina Haspel, then the C.I.A. director, went to great lengths to prevent Mr. Patel from being installed in senior intelligence and law enforcement roles.
Yet the Patel selection stands out as more concretely dangerous and worrisome than many of the other questionable Trump choices. The true danger is almost less about Mr. Patel and more about what it says about Mr. Trump and his approach to his new presidency.
To understand the full scope of the damage Mr. Patel could inflict, you have to understand how unique, powerful and dangerous the F.B.I. can be — and why a Patel directorship would likely corrupt and bend the institution for decades, even if he only served a few years.
Choosing anyone new at this point is concerning because it is a flagrant break with tradition. There is no current vacancy at the head of the F.B.I.: Following J. Edgar Hoover’s decades-long tenure, Congress set into law in 1976 a 10-year term for the F.B.I. director, fireable only for cause. It is meant to isolate the job from political influence, and Christopher Wray — originally nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 — still has two years left to serve.
Before Mr. Trump, no incoming president had replaced the F.B.I. director on a whim; it’s a role that’s meant to exist outside the normal structure of political appointments. Mr. Trump now wants to fire and replace the man he himself selected to lead the institution because he seems to believe that Mr. Wray, a longtime Republican official, is not sufficiently loyal nor willing to wield the bureau’s immense powers against Mr. Trump’s political opponents and domestic enemies.
Unlike Mr. Patel, who has never been nominated for a Senate-confirmed position, every F.B.I. director in modern times has been vetted and confirmed (often repeatedly) by the Senate to another position first. Three F.B.I. directors were federal judges before being selected. Robert Mueller had been nominated by both Republican and Democratic presidents and confirmed by overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the Senate; James Comey had been in front of the Senate twice for confirmation before Barack Obama nominated him for F.B.I. director. Mr. Wray had been head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, a role that earned him the department’s highest award for leadership and public service.
Moreover, the idea of pointing a Trump loyalist like Mr. Patel goes against the fundamental approach all recent presidents have taken — which is that they’ve appointed nonpartisan figures, known for their independence. Directors, in turn, usually go out of their way to demonstrate clear independence from the presidents who appointed them. Bill Clinton’s relationship with his choice, Louis Freeh, was so tested during the Clinton scandals that the two men weren’t even on speaking terms, and Mr. Freeh turned in his White House pass to avoid even the appearance of familiarity with the president. Mr. Comey infamously took it upon himself to excoriate Hillary Clinton publicly over her handling of emails as secretary of state to demonstrate his independence from the Obama administration and Justice Department.
What this independence illustrates is that the F.B.I. is not, as many MAGA loyalists believe, some liberal bastion of wokeness. No Democrat has ever served as an F.B.I. director. Even Democratic presidents appoint Republican officials to head the bureau, as Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton both did in their presidencies.
Mr. Trump has been clear in what he is trying to do with a nominee like Mr. Patel: He wants to bend and break the bureau and weaponize it against his political enemies and domestic critics. Mr. Patel himself said last year that he hopes to prosecute journalists.
We should take such threats seriously. Weaponizing the F.B.I. against domestic opponents doesn’t have to end with jail time. The F.B.I. can do immense damage to people’s lives even if they are never accused of a crime — in recent decades, it has mistakenly zeroed in on the wrong suspects in high-profile cases such as the Atlanta Olympics bombing, where its spotlight ruined the life of the security guard Richard Jewell, and the post-9/11 anthrax investigation that turned the biodefense researcher Dr. Steven Hatfill’s life upside down before the bureau realized it had the wrong man. Being the target of an F.B.I. investigation, even if it leads nowhere, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills, upend families, end careers and lead to federal charges, like lying to a federal agent, that are all but unrelated to the original investigation.
The modern F.B.I. can survive someone like Kash Patel for a little while. Even beyond Hoover’s decades of leadership, when his agents abused the civil liberties of numerous Americans and a deputy sent a blackmail note to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. encouraging him to commit suicide, the F.B.I. has had poor directors who have caused egregious scandals. Hoover’s successor, the acting F.B.I. director L. Patrick Gray III, burned sensitive files about Watergate that he’d hidden in his closet rather than turn them over to investigators. In 1993, William Sessions was actually fired for cause, after abusing subordinates and the taxpayer’s trust, but only after a damning internal investigation.
The bureau came through those scandals stronger, in part because of the new, more rigorous oversight regimes installed by the Justice Department, the courts and Congress to monitor for and alert the public to abuses of powers.
The modern F.B.I. is rigid in much of its adherence to what it can do and what it can’t. As much as the Republicans crow about its lawlessness, the bureau is filled with nearly 2,000 lawyers — including many agents themselves — and it is scrupulous in its bureaucracy and careful documentation of investigative steps. It would take enormous, concerted effort to bend the bureau, but with time it could happen.
Nevertheless, a Patel directorship of even a few years could cause grave, lasting harm to the institution. One of the key ways a director shapes the bureau is through the promotion of top agents, from section chiefs to unit chiefs to special agent in charge to assistant directors and executive assistant directors. Mr. Patel’s choices of those leaders would shape the bureau for decades.
When I first interviewed F.B.I. leaders in the late 2000s, I was struck by how long and large Hoover’s shadow still loomed. After all, with some agent careers stretching to 25 years, the men who were atop the bureau had all been trained by men trained by Hoover. (And yes, the agents corps is still almost all men — the bureau is the only top federal law enforcement agency never to have a woman serve as director.)
That lasting impact — even today, Hoover is really only two generations removed from the bureau — and directing the unparalleled resources of the F.B.I. should be more than enough to raise the alarm of the danger of Mr. Patel.
Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author of, among other books, “The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War” and “Watergate: A New History.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
