Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“President-elect Donald Trump said [last] Saturday he wanted former National Security official and loyalist Kash Patel to lead the FBI, signaling an intent to drive out the bureau's current director, Christopher Wray. Patel, who during Trump's first term advised both the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense, has previously called for stripping the FBI of its intelligence-gathering role and purging its ranks of any employee who refuses to support Trump's agenda.” Reuters
The left argues that there is no compelling reason to fire Wray, and is critical of Patel.
“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 did in their presidencies… Directors, in turn, usually go out of their way to demonstrate clear independence from the presidents who appointed them…
“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. He now wants to fire and replace the man he selected to lead the institution because he seems to believe that Mr. Wray, a longtime Republican official, is not sufficiently loyal or willing to wield the bureau’s immense powers against Mr. Trump’s political opponents and perceived domestic enemies.”
Garrett M. Graff, New York Times
“During his various appearances on [Steve] Bannon’s show, Patel and/or his interviewees declared that: China is funding the Democratic Party and sending ‘military-aged males’ across the Mexican and Canadian borders to prepare for a preemptive strike. Barack Obama directs a ‘shadow network’ that is quietly directing the intelligence community and Big Tech to persecute Trump. [And] Attorney General Merrick Garland wants to throw ‘all of us’ — which is to say, Trump allies — in prison…
“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.’…
“If this all reminds you of the most infamous director of the FBI — J. Edgar Hoover — well, it should. The two men share a dangerous tendency to link enemies foreign and domestic, and a willingness to entertain dangerous abuses of law enforcement powers in fighting them.”
Zack Beauchamp, Vox
“Don’t listen to me; listen to Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr… In his memoir, Barr said he told then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would get the [FBI] deputy job ‘over my dead body.’ Patel, Barr wrote, ‘had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency. The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality.’…
“‘Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion,’ the Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro wrote in an August profile… Calabro quoted a longtime Trump adviser about the president-elect’s views of Patel: ‘A lot of people say he’s crazy,’ Trump had said, according to the adviser. ‘I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.’ No. Not at the FBI. Senators, do your jobs.”
Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
The right is critical of the FBI, and generally supports Patel.
The right is critical of the FBI, and generally supports Patel.
“Biden believes that the Biden controlled Department of Justice ‘selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted’ his son, Hunter Biden. If the President’s own Justice Department could selectively and unfairly prosecute someone and the FBI Director can kick in doors and bug people’s homes without anyone’s knowledge, maybe, just maybe, we should be restraining these institutions. Maybe, just maybe, we have made these institutions too powerful. If we cannot put Kash Patel in the FBI Director’s Chair because he could return to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, maybe the problem is not Patel but the FBI.”
Erick-Woods Erickson, Substack
“We have just emerged from a protracted election season in which Donald Trump informed the electorate, loudly and clearly, that he felt that the FBI was corrupt and ought to be disciplined. Whether he was right or wrong — and irrespective of the degree to which this position affected the outcome — a system in which the FBI’s director may not be easily removed after such a campaign is a system with a profound legitimacy problem…
“[The FBI] has never slotted well into our constitutional system of government, and it still doesn’t. Now, as ever, it is corrupt, arrogant, recalcitrant, distracted, ambitious, and politicized. Such flaws are a risk in any institution of law enforcement, which is why, in pretty much every other case, we ensure that American police departments are headed up by a commissioner, chief, or sheriff who is either popularly elected or appointed by the elected government…
“To break the direct connection between the department and the civil power to which it is accountable is to create a rogue agency that answers to nobody… If, having fruitfully contested an election promising change at the top of the FBI, a new president is unable to effect change at the top of the FBI, then how, exactly, are voters supposed to hold the FBI accountable?”
Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review
“[Critical] descriptions of Patel suggest Trump pulled a random guy off the street to weaponize the agency on his behalf. In reality, Patel is familiar with both the bureaucracy and intelligence agencies, having worked as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor, the U.S. Secretary of Defense’s chief of staff, a U.S. National Security Council official, and principal deputy to the acting Director of National Intelligence…
“Most importantly, Patel had a front-row seat to the deep state’s ploy, aided heavily by the propaganda press, to overthrow Trump when he served as a senior aide to former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes. Patel and Nunes’ efforts to blow open the Russia collusion hoax made them victims of the DOJ’s spying and targets of a years-long corporate media smear campaign… He is the perfect man for the job.”
Jordan Boyd, The Federalist
Here Are 2024’s Best Northern Lights Photographs.
My Modern Met
