Can Kash Patel Do What Needs to Be Done?
Donald Trump’s cabinet selections have caused successive political shockwaves in Washington, DC. While the MAGA faithful are treating his picks like a fantasy football draft, each Truth Social post announcing the latest nomination has sent the mainstream media into yet another rage spiral. When The Washington Post, the uniparty, and media talking heads are equally angry about the president’s selections, that’s likely a sign that Trump has made a quality pick (though, of course, vibes alone aren’t a guarantee that every nominee will be successful).
To say that Trump has learned important lessons regarding the kind of people he needs in his second administration is an understatement: these selections show a Trump whose knowledge and judgment have advanced relative to the man who made the cabinet choices he made in 2016. He has a far greater understanding of how DC operates and the caliber of people he needs to mount an effective counterrevolution against the unaccountable government in our nation’s capital.
Though Trump’s picks are being roundly condemned as “un-American” and bizarre by Beltway elites, for many Americans—and not simply President Trump’s most die-hard supporters—these picks are considered necessary to alter the country’s current trajectory fundamentally. Survey after survey shows that a clear majority of Americans think the U.S. is barreling down a pockmarked road, and they rightly want to change course before it careens off a cliff. Trump’s nominations, therefore, need to be judged against this benchmark—not what would make the hosts of the Sunday political shows happy.
Trump’s recent nomination of Kash Patel to be the FBI director has been greeted with the expected response from our bipartisan political class. Unlike the Matt Gaetz pick, the fury over Patel seems far less about personality than effectiveness. Investigative journalist Lee Smith heralded the move, calling Patel’s selection “an awesome day for America!” (Smith has chronicled Patel’s efforts leading the Russiagate investigation for former U.S. Representative Devin Nunes in books and articles.) Others were not so complimentary. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia described Patel as a “zealot.” “Out of a sea of unqualified, dangerous, and downright bizarre nominations, this is perhaps the worst.”
Who is Kash Patel? In addition to helping former Rep. Nunes, he’s served as a former public defender in Florida, a Department of Justice prosecutor, Chief of Staff for U.S. Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, and a principal deputy to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, among other important posts.
And why are so many DC insiders upset about Patel’s selection? His recent appearance on Shawn Ryan’s podcast gives us the answer. Patel said he’d shut down the “FBI Hoover building on day one” and reopen it “the next day as a museum of the Deep State.” He’d disperse the FBI’s 7,000 employees across America to be cops instead of serving as the domestic arm of the Intelligence Community.
Though this may sound radical, thinking along these lines is necessary to upend some of the most destructive post-World War II traditions that supply the Beltway’s moral authority. After all, as counter-terrorism expert Kyle Shideler has noted, “the FBI, is utterly unreliable and aggressively politicized, with a decade-long track record of deliberately obfuscating the motivations for terror attacks from all manner of threats, both foreign and domestic.” It’s clear that a fundamental reorganization is necessary to bring competency and legitimacy back to the FBI.
What Patel recommends on Ryan’s podcast is much of the same advice Angelo Codevilla gave in his tour de force essay for The American Mind, “Abolish FISA, Reform FBI, & Break Up CIA.” Codevilla counsels that the “FBI must be restricted to law enforcement” rather than being allowed to remain an institution populated with petty, partisan bureaucrats whose calling card is entrapment. “Once upon a time, FBI foreign counterintelligence officers were cops first,” Codevilla writes. “Like all good cops, they knew the difference between the people on whose behalf they worked, and those who threaten them.”
Codevilla argues that the turning point for the FBI happened under the watch of William Webster, who served as FBI director from 1978 to 1987. Webster introduced political correctness into the FBI, failing to penetrate Jim Jones’s cult supposedly because he did not want to interfere with any religious sect (never mind that Jones had deep ties with the Democratic Party in California).
Director Webster also partnered with the ACLU “as the principal sponsor of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” Codevilla rightly lambasts FISA for “unconstitutionally mingl[ing] judicial and executive power in secret” thus incentivizing “political abuse.” FISA has essentially been a rubber stamp for the Intelligence Community: for the first 33 years of its existence, the FISA Court approved 99.97% of warrants, turning down just 12 over that period.
According to Codevilla, all of this combined to initiate a fundamental transformation of the FBI from a domestic law enforcement institution to just another bureaucratic entity that serves the interests of the regime:
Thus, FBI officers became standard bureaucrats who learned to operate on the assumption that all Americans were just as likely as not to be proper targets of investigation. They replaced the distinctions by which they had previously operated with the classic bureaucratic imperative: look out for yourselves by making sure to please the powerful.
There is no question that the FBI needs to be fundamentally restructured according to its original purpose, especially in the wake of the Russiagate scandal and a disastrous string of recent directors like James Comey and Andrew McCabe—Comey being Exhibit A of pleasing the powerful by attempting to circumvent a constitutionally chosen presidential administration that the political class despised.
Reorganizing the FBI is necessary to reestablish the grounds of republican government, which today will look on the surface like a revolutionary project. Burkeanism, or how Edmund Burke’s political judgment has been typically presented by a certain faction within the conservative movement, will not save us. Neither will decrying Trump’s breaking of “norms” when most of those norms are encrusted barnacles attached to the hull of a rotted-out ship of state. A movement that restores the connection between the government and the people it’s supposed to serve is imperative.
All of this comes down to having an accurate understanding of our political moment: Are things as bad as they appear to be, or will things simply go on forever as they have been—Democrats and Republicans fighting back and forth as the rachet keeps clicking further to the Left? As Michael Anton noted in his justly praised “The Flight 93 Election” essay at the Claremont Review of Books, “if your answer is for “conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing…even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.” The last time I checked, the FBI’s current configuration is neither in the Constitution nor is it a dictate of natural law.
In an Annual Message to Congress in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln noted, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Thinking and acting anew in 2024 means questioning the fundamental tenets of our current regime—the one that broke long ago with most of the traditional practices and principles of government the American founders established. It’s time to reform the FBI to serve the American people’s interests—not the court class.
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Trump succeeded in part because he convinced his followers that there was only one swamp and the he is an outsider to it. And yet, what did he do during his first Presidency. He dramatically increased military spending, which helps the military industrial complex, employed policies toward immigrants, which financially rewarded privately owned detention centers, he cut regulations that protected workers and the environment and cut costs for corporations, and his tax cuts primarily benefitted the upper 10% of the population.
And so perhaps Trump does know how DC works and the Swamp better in ways that perhaps he wants to distract the public from. In truth, there is more than one swamp and Trump has been a part of it.
Now we can tell people to automatically dismiss objections to Trump’s picks, like Kash Patel, by calling those who raise those objections ‘elites.’ Of course, it the elites that Trumpublicans complain about who are part of the Swamp. But specific objections to Patel as listed by Jenai Nelson from the legal defense fund include:
1. is strong lacking in qualifications
2. he has threatened to go after those in government and the media who supported the big lie and used it to help elect Biden
3. he spreads disinformation and makes threats against the media and political opponents of Trump
4. he is seen as a Trump loyalist.
Does the FBI need reform? How do we know? And what kind of reform does it need? Does it need to be led by a loyalist of the President who started the big lie before he was ever elected?
Mr.Day…”Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” William Shakespeare from “Macbeth” act 5, scene 5