“Individuals acting alone are always the hardest perpetrators to detect, and if these attacks lead to a resurgence of domestic terrorism by copycats inspired by bloodshed, the country is going to want the best possible people working to track them down. That description does not include Kash Patel, Trump’s choice for F.B.I. director, and Tulsi Gabbard, his pick for director of national intelligence…

“[Patel] has said the F.B.I. intelligence divisions are its ‘biggest problem.’ He wants to somehow break away those divisions and return the bureau to fighting street crime. ‘Go be cops,’ he said on a podcast in September, as if the F.B.I. were a precinct house on the south side of Chicago… In fact, as the departing director, Christopher Wray, has made clear, the bureau needs to increase its intelligence efforts to counter growing threats around the globe…

“Patel might know that if he had any real background in counterintelligence. As The Times recently reported, he was only a junior prosecutor in the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section, doing routine paperwork, and colleagues said he routinely exaggerated his importance… [Meanwhile] Gabbard has never been a member of a congressional intelligence committee nor worked in the intelligence world… To make the country safer, Senate Republicans should demand better choices.”

‍David Firestone, New York Times

“Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, called for a hearing on the attack and alleged that ‘the Biden Administration has made [Americans] less safe,’ through unspecified negligence. But no public information so far suggests that authorities could have stopped the killer from renting a truck and driving it into a crowd…

“The most effective antidote to attacks like this is probably just to do what the United States did late in Barack Obama’s second term and throughout Trump’s first: to dismantle the Islamic State and relegate it to obscurity.”

‍Graeme Wood, The Atlantic