“Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to replace Christopher Wray as director of the FBI, has threatened to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens” and “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” What exactly does he mean by that? Given the position that Patel will hold if he is confirmed by the Senate, the answer could have serious implications not only for the anti-Trump journalists he has in mind but also for freedom of the press generally.”
“Trump’s decision to nominate Patel has proven particularly controversial, since his principal qualification appears to be his sycophancy toward Trump. (A Trump transition spokesperson said, “Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic director.”)
Many observers, including former federal law enforcement officials, oppose Patel’s nomination on the grounds that he would likely use the FBI to pursue Trump’s political opponents and that he might substantially corrupt the culture and professionalism of the bureau. To some, Patel calls to mind the specter of J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director whose nearly 50-year stint running the agency until 1972 was marked by egregious abuses of power — including illegal surveillance, blackmail and the harassment of political dissidents.
Patel clearly lacks the qualifications, experience and temperament to lead the agency. But how worried should the American public really be about him at the helm of the FBI?
The truth is that there are stronger internal and external safeguards in place against law enforcement abuses than during the Hoover era. He will indeed face some constraints because of the culture and bureaucracy of the FBI. But they may not contain him. And he will have plenty of opportunity to damage the bureau and its work — and to use and abuse the FBI for political ends. His nomination poses a considerable and unjustifiable risk to the country.”
“Wray’s decision undermined decades of hard work — by Congress, presidents, the Justice Department and the FBI itself — to move it out of a partisan, political framework. The FBI’s highest guiding principle is supposed to be the rule of law — and federal law is clear: The FBI director serves a 10-year-term, a length meant to isolate the role from political winds. Similarly, in federal law, there is a mechanism for removing an FBI director who errs — they can be fired, but only for cause. The role is not meant to be like the CIA director, attorney general or Defense secretary and turn over at noon on Jan. 20 for a new administration; it is, in fact, explicitly designed to NOT do so. Ronald Reagan spent almost all of his presidency with Jimmy Carter’s FBI director; George W. Bush inherited Bill Clinton’s FBI director; Barack Obama, in turn, inherited Bush’s, and Joe Biden will have spent his entire presidency with Wray, Trump’s choice to head the bureau.
Those safeguards and traditions exist because the FBI, in the wrong hands, is incredibly dangerous to American democracy.
The FBI is the most powerful, best resourced, and far-reaching law enforcement agency, not just in the United States, but anywhere in the world. Nothing compares to the sweeping breadth of its investigative powers; the intelligence and information it collects, wittingly and unwittingly, on all manner of Americans, powerful and not, guilty and innocent alike; and the resources and technologies it can bring to bear against anyone in its investigative sights. Even its routine investigations can paralyze and bankrupt businesses, upend lives, careers and families, and destroy reputations — and even do so when it doesn’t bring federal charges at the end. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign, he deployed those resources to ruin the lives of civil rights activists and antiwar protesters, harass literary figures such as James Baldwin, blackmail gay people and persecute anyone he didn’t feel was sufficiently patriotic. We’ve spent a half-century as a nation trying to make sure that never happens again — and now Trump is explicitly saying he wants to restart that darkest chapter of the FBI’s history.”
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“let’s be clear about what’s happening here: The only reason Trump wants to change FBI directors is he doesn’t think he can boss, bend and break Wray to his will sufficiently, that Wray would not be personally loyal to him in the way that he has wanted his FBI directors to be — and which, institutionally, they’re explicitly not supposed to be. Every single part of that is a dire warning sign about what’s to come under Trump II and what he and Patel intend to do with the bureau.
Wray had an opportunity to make that a fight — to force Trump to bear the political cost of firing him on invented pretexts, to force the president to be the one who destroyed that guardrail rather than Wray himself. And, instead of upholding that oath to the Constitution, the rule of law and duty to protect the bureau from outside influence, Wray just … capitulated.”
“These experiences have given Patel a worldview that I think is best defined as paranoid.
Patel believes that foreign enemies — ranging from China to Iran to drug cartels — are doing their best to infiltrate the United States and wreak havoc on its homeland. Only Trump has the strength and the fortitude to stand up against these enemies and defend American allies like Israel.
The Democrats, he believes, do not just disagree with Trump on how to handle these threats: They are actively aligned with America’s enemies.
In one War Room segment, for example, Patel hosted a discredited China “expert” named Gordon Chang to warn that China was “planning an attack on our facilities on our soil.” But it’s worse than that, Chang argued: China had installed Joe Biden as the president of the United States.
“They were actually able to cast the decisive vote in 2020,” Chang told Patel, claiming without evidence that China “poured money into Joe Biden’s campaign” through the Democratic crowdfunding platform ActBlue. Patel’s response was not skepticism but credulity: “I hope people are paying attention.”
But Democrats are not merely unwitting cat’s paws of foreign powers, per Patel: They are nefarious actors aiming to tear down American democracy.
One of Patel’s favorite phrases, one that he uses again and again on Bannon’s show, is “two-tiered system of justice.” In his mind, federal law enforcement employs two distinct standards — one for “the deep state’s” friends and another for its enemies. Its allies, like the Bidens, receive only limited and superficial scrutiny, while its enemies are constantly harassed and persecuted. The four prosecutions of Trump, for Patel, are not legitimate inquiries into wrongdoing and abuses of power, but rather agents of a corrupt system lashing out at the one man who threatens their grip on America.
For this reason, Patel has an enemies list — literally. His book Government Gangsters, which he is constantly hawking on War Room, contains an appendix listing dozens of names that comprise the “executive branch deep state.””
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“he is constantly proposing schemes — like Congress arresting Garland — that amount to efforts to criminalize political disagreements. This includes proposals to investigate prominent Democrats and even prosecute journalists.
“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,” he said in a guest appearance on War Room last year.
“Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.””
“President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs, people close to the transition planning say.
Trump and his allies believe the FBI system is slow and plagued with issues that could stymie the president-elect’s plan to quickly begin the work of implementing his agenda, people briefed on the plans said. Critics say the intrusive background checks sometimes turn up embarrassing information used to inflict political damage.
The discussions come as Trump has floated several controversial choices for high-level positions in the US government – including Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
Ultimately, the president has the final authority on who he nominates and decides to share intelligence with, regardless of the established protocol set in the wake of World War II to make sure those selections don’t have unknown foreign ties or other issues that could raise national security concerns.
But circumventing background checks would be bucking a long-established norm in Washington. It also reflects Trump’s deep mistrust of the national security establishment, which he derides as the Deep State. Sources say he has privately questioned the need for law enforcement background checks.”
“After a student leader of the historic Tiananmen Square protests entered a 2022 congressional race in New York, a Chinese intelligence operative wasted little time enlisting a private investigator to hunt for any mistresses or tax problems that could upend the candidate’s bid, prosecutors say.
“In the end,” the operative ominously told his contact, “violence would be fine too.”
As an Iranian journalist and activist living in exile in the United States aired criticism of Iran’s human rights abuses, Tehran was listening too. Members of an Eastern European organized crime gang scouted her Brooklyn home and plotted to kill her in a murder-for-hire scheme directed from Iran, according to the Justice Department, which foiled the plan and brought criminal charges.
The episodes reflect the extreme measures taken by countries like China and Iran to intimidate, harass and sometimes plot attacks against political opponents and activists who live in the U.S. They show the frightening consequences that geopolitical tensions can have for ordinary citizens as governments historically intolerant of dissent inside their own borders are increasingly keeping a threatening watch on those who speak out thousands of miles away.”
“If the Ninth Circuit applies that same reasoning after it hears the case this week, it would deal a serious blow to the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections in other contexts. In effect, that would say that as long as law enforcement has at least one legitimate reason for cracking open the safe deposit boxes, agents of the state are free to engage in all manner of rights violations without the targets having any legal recourse. It would be equivalent to saying that if the owner of a parking garage is suspected of a crime, all the cars (and the contents of those cars) stored there could be forfeited by the government.
“If the FBI can get away with this here, it’s a green light for the government to try the same ruse again throughout the country,” warns Johnson. “And it’s not just safe deposit boxes. The government could pull the same trick with storage lockers, hotels, even apartment buildings.””
“”Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, FBI agents unsuccessfully attempted to pressure a group of innocent Muslims, including Muhammad Tanvir, to become informants for the Bureau,” notes the Institute for Justice (I.J.), which filed an amicus brief in Tanvir v. Tanzin. “Tanvir and the others—who were all either American citizens or lawful permanent residents—declined to become informants, because doing so goes against their sincerely held religious beliefs. FBI agents then harassed the group and placed them all on the No-Fly List.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights acts as co-counsels for the plaintiffs alongside the CUNY School of Law’s CLEAR Clinic. They sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ Muslim faith forbids them to inform on coreligionists. The defendants—FBI agents who put Tanvir and the other plaintiffs on the no-fly list—protested that the RFRA doesn’t provide for monetary damages against government officials who violate rights, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise in an important 2020 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas.”
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“In 2021, The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain wrote about Aswad Khan’s mistreatment by the FBI when he refused to be an informant. That same year, Ahmad Chebli, a U.S. citizen, described a similar ordeal.
“Agents threatened my family and me,” he wrote. “They said that if I didn’t agree to become an informant, my family would be investigated, my wife and I could be arrested, my children could be taken away, and my wife’s immigration status could be at risk.”
Chebli was finally removed from the No Fly list after the ACLU sued on his behalf.
Watchlists aren’t supposed to be used this way. In 2014, a federal district judge declared the byzantine process for people to challenge their inclusion on the no-fly list unconstitutional and ordered better guarantees of due process. But as Chebli’s case demonstrates, it’s easy for the government to put people on the lists and then pull them off years later only after they’ve gone through the hassle and expense of filing a federal lawsuit—if they ever do. With no further consequences, that leaves administrative tools like the No Fly List available for ongoing abuse.”