The Opinions - Kash Patel as F.B.I. Director Could ‘Destabilize the Whole System’

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

President Trump’s pick for F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, is no stranger to controversy. And despite a vigorous Senate hearing on Thursday, he appears to be coasting toward confirmation. The New York Times politics correspondent Michelle Cottle spoke to the journalist and author Garrett Graff on what Patel’s F.B.I. appointment could mean for America, and of all of Trump’s nominees, why Patel is among the most dangerous.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle. I'm a political writer for New York Times Opinion and a co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. And today, I'm delighted to be joined by journalist and author Garrett Graf to talk about President Trump's choice to head the FBI, Cash Patel, who just had his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday. If an FBI director promoted a song of people who sprayed pepper spray in the face of an FBI agent, would you say they were fit to be director? Mr. Shedd? Yes or no, would they be fit to be director? I am fit to be the director of the FBI.

Despite the long and spicy proceedings, Patel is widely expected to be confirmed. But Garrett has observed, quote, of all the Trump nominees, Patel ranks. among the most dangerous. Okay, that's ominous. Garrett, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. It's my pleasure to talk to you anytime. I want to get us started just with what your initial reaction to the hearings were.

So just give me your Reader's Digest, condensed version. I think it seems clear that the Republican senators are circling wagons around Cash Patel. And it seemed like the Republican support behind him is strong. and that, you know, I think he seems like he is coasting towards confirmation. I was struck by how much it felt like those were his defense lawyers there. Boosting him along. I mean, Chuck Grassley, the chairman, put on his best kind of scolding grandpa tone. I expect Mr. Patel to be treated fairly by my colleagues who are here today to consider the nomination.

And they did, as you say, circle the wagons. But I also, like you, went into this thinking he would almost have had to have jumped up and stabbed a Republican during the hearing for this to kind of derail his nomination. There's just he is the kind of central disruptive figure that Trump is looking to to overhaul the deep state, it looks like. And I just, I can't, I can't foresee or I couldn't foresee what was going to stop this. Yeah, I think also one of the things that we have seen that has united the nominees that are wavering or have been withdrawn, like in the case of President Trump's first Attorney General pick, Matt Gates, is that they are sort of personally odious. We saw Pete Higgseth really struggle with personal allegations about his behavior. We've seen Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. really struggle in confirmation hearings because of their personal views or associations. And in Cash Patel's case, I think he is institutionally worrisome, but doesn't appear to have the sort of troubling personal background that at least bothers the Republicans.

Even beyond the hearing, which, you know, is a lot theater in these situations, you know an awful lot about the bureau. You've been reporting on the FBI for 15 years. You've written multiple books. You know this agency. Why is Patel such an unusual choice? Yeah. To me, what is so uniquely dangerous about Cash Patel as FBI director, is that he represents a complete repudiation of the very specific model of FBI director that we have had in the 50 years since the death of J. Edgar Hoover. That at the end of Hoover's then 50-year reign at the FBI, the FBI had been really perfected by Hoover as a political weapon. You know, FBI officials sent, you know, blackmail tapes and a note encouraging suicide to Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. They used it to out and punish homosexuals in Washington politics, and that as Hoover's full reign of terror became clear in the 1970s, Congress, the Justice Department, the executive branch, the courts put in all sorts of new guardrails and protections and oversight capabilities to ensure that the FBI could never be used

like that again. That's why they have the 10-year appointments, right? Exactly. That FBI directors have been appointed by presidents for a 10-year term, which is is very specifically meant to be so that they are removed from day-to-day politics. Cash Patel comes from an incredibly different place. He is one of the ultimate MAGA loyalists. He has an incredibly thin resume.

He's younger by a decade than any previous recent FBI director. and he has no management background. And Cash Patel, very notably, has been appointed sort of particularly because he is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump. He, you know, hawks merchandise featuring Donald Trump. He was a Trump staffer. He has appeared at Trump political rallies as a speaker, which is just a completely unthinkable black mark for any previous FBI nominee, and that he is being appointed with an explicit mission, seemingly from the president, to weaponize the FBI in exactly the way that Hoover

used to weaponize it. Now, you've done a lot of thinking about where this all could go. Earlier this week, you published a newsletter laying out three possible ways. In broad strokes, you want to walk us through some of those? Yeah, we don't really know, obviously, how this will unfold. But what I can imagine happening are a couple of different things. The FBI is an enormously bureaucratic organization. You know, agents joke that bureaucracy is literally its middle name. And so I think that there is one scenario where the building is able to resist. some of Cash Patel's worst impulses. You know, he is remarkably inexperienced, and that could work against him as he tries to both,

quote, unquote, reform the Bureau and also make it do his bidding and President Trump's bidding. There's another scenario, of course, where Cash Patel succeeds and returns the FBI to the dark ages as a political weapon, as a secret police for the president. And it is also an agency that very uniquely reveres the role of director and takes orders from the director seriously as they roll down through that big bureaucracy. Both of these scenarios, though, I think, come with some meaningful risk to the American people, both in terms of our national security. as well as our democracy. And I think Cash Patel's vision for what the FBI does is particularly dangerous because he has been very clear that he wants the FBI to sort of go back to being cops. But much of its work, particularly post-9-11, has been in the national security realm.

Patel sees those national security, the counterintelligence cases, the espionage cases, the counterterrorism cases that it does as being, you know, part and parcel of this sort of deep state surveillance state that he thinks is where the deep state lives in the FBI. Getting rid of that, undoing that, cutting that back is a recipe for another nine. 11. The FBI has done an enormous amount of work very carefully and very thoughtfully to build relationships and cooperation and intelligence sharing with the CIA and the NSA and other intelligence agencies to combat cyber threats, to combat intelligence threats, to combat counterterrorism threats, and undoing that comes at a pretty steep cost. All of this to me then seems to feed into the larger danger that we've seen with President Trump, which is when you start undermining the public faith in institutions, then those institutions can't really function like they're supposed to. I mean, you don't have people who are willing to share information. You don't have the ability to hold government officials accountable when they've done things that are wrong because you just claim that the FBI is. is itself corrupt.

And so you continue to destabilize the whole system. I mean, do you see this going forward even now that he's back in charge? I mean, I can see him doing it under a Biden administration, but it seems like this could be where we're headed even under his administration. Yeah. And I think to me, you know, there's this sort of overarching shame, I think, in a lot of Trump's appointments is that by, with these people that he is putting forward, for jobs like Attorney General, Director of National Intelligence, FBI Director,

it sort of forces you to defend institutions that are actually really in need of reform. You know, part of the challenge of this is, you know, boy, America could really use a great, thoughtful, nuanced discussion about the FBI's surveillance authorities and oversight structure, you know, a quarter century after 9-11. Cash Patel is clearly not the person who should be leading that, nor is Cash Patel coming in with a particularly nuanced and thoughtful vision for how to improve the oversight structures of the Office of General Counsel. You know, he's coming in with a very explicit one that he returned to in his confirmation

hearings of saying, you know, basically, I want to close headquarters entirely on day one. But what about oversight down the road? I mean, theoretically, is there anything that can be done once Patel is in place in terms of just oversight of the department? Yeah. I mean, once you get into the role, the oversight of the FBI largely falls to the courts and to the Justice Department. And I think to me, the challenge and this is the challenge that we see across so much of the Trump administration is the preempt. is the primary check and balance in U.S. government, in U.S. democracy, turns out to be not putting irresponsible people into positions of responsibility. Oh, that's so unfortunate.

And it is. And, like, that's the, you know, like putting someone in charge of the FBI who actually cares about the FBI's independence and cares about their own personal integrity. And right now, we have a lineup of the least qualified, least experienced, most partisan and politically loyal nominees we have ever seen for any of these roles. So making this, taking this down to a more personal level, during his hearing, Patel disavowed that list of enemies that he published in the book, government gangsters. He assured everyone during the hearing. It's not an enemy's list. It's a total mischaracterization. But let's just say for argument's sake, he did want to go after some of these folks for retribution. What could he do?

What would be one of the more likely scenarios? So I think part of this is understanding that the FBI can ruin lives without bringing criminal charges. You know, the FBI can drag you along for a couple of years in an investigation that requires you to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on legal bills and never goes anywhere, but, you know, destroys your financial security. Success for Cash Patel in a persecution of a political enemy might be just the visuals of the FBI agents raiding a home or an office. carrying boxes of documents out to sort of personally embarrass and smear people. I think to me, the reason that Cash Patel is so uniquely dangerous as FBI director is because this is such a tactical and operational role. I mean, there are so many places where Donald Trump is installing dangerously inexperienced people in.

cabinet rolls or agency heads that just frankly don't do that much operationally day-to-day. And so, you know, are somewhat insulated in the actual damage that they can wreak on individual targeted lives. And this is a situation where Cash Patel would be taking over the reins of a position where he can make life incredibly unlawful. comfortable for individual people very quickly. Well, okay, so that's certainly a beat. Before I let you go here, what is it that is most keeping you up at night with the situation right now?

Well, I think to me, the challenge, it actually has to do with the mid-air collision that we saw in D.C. because to me, I think that that incident crystallizes one of my biggest fears about the Trump era that we are entering, which is government works until it doesn't, and that we forget just how hard it is to actually make government work on a day-to-day basis. And, you know, the average American shouldn't actually have to care about who the FBI director is. You know, the fact that this week we are like paying attention to who the inspector general of the Department of Agriculture is, you know, is a problem. And to me, what I really worry about is how complacent we are as a country about the backdrop of support that the federal government gives to our lives. lives in a thousand different ways in a daily basis that we have never thought about in living

history. And that Donald Trump's assault on these institutions undermines those basic protections, clean water, clean air, safe air travel, an FBI that protects us against terrorism. We're going to have a four-year test of that complacency is what you're telling me. Yes. Okay. Well, now I'm going to be up. at nine. I want to just thank you for that. But no, I really appreciate this. This has been fantastic. Michelle, it is always a pleasure to talk to you even about the darkest of subjects. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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