Will FBI Director Kash Patel Be a Principled Reformer or a Trump Hatchet Man?
Before last fall’s election, Kash Patel assured Donald Trump’s supporters that the former and future president’s enemies would get their comeuppance once he was back in power. Patel, a former federal prosecutor who held various national security positions during Trump’s first term, said a second Trump administration would “come after” the “deep state” agents, including journalists as well as former federal officials, who supposedly had conspired to undermine democracy by opposing the president’s agenda. Although Patel was hazy on exactly what crimes those people had committed, he promised to get them one way or another.
After Trump picked Patel to run the FBI, the nominee repudiated his threats of retaliation, presenting himself as a sober and conscientious public servant who would never take “retributive actions” or allow politics to affect decisions at the country’s leading law enforcement agency. The Republican-controlled Senate, which narrowly confirmed Patel as FBI director on Thursday, evidently bought that transformation. Soon we will learn which Patel is running the FBI: the Trump hatchet man who served as a pugnacious proxy for his 2024 campaign or a principled reformer dedicated to justice and the rule of law.
Patel’s public comments and published works provide plenty of reason to be skeptical of his new persona. In his podcast interviews, he comes across as a reckless partisan whose overriding concern is loyalty to Trump. That preeminent priority explains Patel’s coziness with QAnon followers, whose manifestly loony beliefs he was willing to overlook because he saw their movement as an important part of the MAGA constituency. It also explains why Patel, even at his confirmation hearing, could not bring himself to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, conceding only that “Joe Biden’s election was certified, he was sworn in, and he served as the president of the United States.”
Patel’s dedication to Trump pervades his children’s books, which recount the travails of “King Donald,” who defeats his evil enemies with the help of “a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer,” an intrepid investigator “known far and wide as the one person who could discover anything about anything.” The same basic narrative underlies Patel’s 2023 book Government Gangsters, which describes a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump that Patel equates with a conspiracy to subvert democracy and the Constitution.
“The price of rule by the Deep State is high—nothing less than the end of self-government in America,” Patel writes. “The Deep State is a cabal of unelected tyrants who think they should determine who the American people can and cannot elect as president, who think they get to decide what the president can and cannot do, and who believe they have the right to choos
Article from Reason.com
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