Saturday night, while many Americans were scarfing down Thanksgiving leftovers, President-elect Donald Trump served up a dish that was too hard to stomach. On his Truth Social platform, Trump announced his choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Many of Trump’s nominees have significant baggage, but Patel’s choice tells us the most about Trump’s plan to subject the rule of law to its own rules — minus the legal part.
It’s not just that Patel is completely unqualified to lead the preeminent law enforcement and intelligence agency in the country and perhaps the world. Yes, he lacks the professional experience necessary to lead the agency’s 37,000 employees in 55 U.S. field offices, 350 satellite offices and 63 foreign locations covering nearly 200 countries. But that’s the least of my worries. After all, Trump’s choices for Secretary of Homeland Security, Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Defense also lack remarkably little competence for their proposed roles. Trump’s first choice for attorney general was so problematic that he withdrew before the Senate confirmation process could begin.
Patel’s specific problem goes far beyond competence: his record shows not devotion to the Constitution, but blind loyalty to Trump. Patel helped spread the fabricated conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump. He has promoted the conspiracy of a “deep state” within government agencies aimed at overthrowing Trump. The court’s findings and the jury system are things that should be important to an FBI director, but Patel doesn’t seem to care that more than 60 legal proceedings have found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, nor that grand juries and trial juries of American citizens have determined Trump. should be criminally charged, held civilly liable and even convicted.
If he becomes FBI director, Patel will be required to take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, but his public statements raise concerns about his ability to keep that oath. In an interview last year with Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Patel vowed to prosecute judges, lawyers and even journalists who he believed had wrongly investigated Trump and influenced the 2020 election. “We will go out and find the conspirators,” he told Bannon, “not just in government but in the media – yes, we are going after the people in the media who lied about American citizens helping Joe Biden to manipulate presidential elections. elections.” That doesn’t sound like a man who wants to strictly adhere to the rule of law. Sounds like a wannabe cop planning false arrests and fabricated evidence.
This would not be the first time in our nation’s history that an FBI director blindly pursued perceived enemies and threats in the absence of critically important evidence. As I wrote earlier this year, in the 1960s, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “with the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and later with the encouragement of President Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and others illegally tapped. civil rights leaders. The FBI sent a letter to King, using details discovered from the wiretap, essentially blackmailing King and suggesting he commit suicide. There were countless “black bag jobs” where the FBI, without court permission, broke into people’s homes, collected evidence, opened and read mail, and planted microphones – all outside the law because someone in power thought it was American citizens somehow impersonated. of threat.”
“In 1968 and into the 1970s, Hoover claimed that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” (It wasn’t.) He discussed the Black Panthers with then-President Richard Nixon and got the green light to go after them when, as Nixon instructed, “you kind of had the smell of a national conspiracy.” You know, like the Panthers and all that.” Unsurprisingly, these types of moves didn’t stop with the Panthers. Nixon ordered the FBI to unlawfully wiretap members of the media without the use of lawful court orders simply because Nixon didn’t like those reporters.
A statue in front of the National Archives in Washington DC bears the words: “What is past is a prologue.” That quote from William Shakespeare is intended to make it clear that history determines our future. The question that Patel’s appointment as FBI director raises is whether we have learned something from our history or whether we are destined to repeat it.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
