WASHINGTON (AP) — Kash Patel has been known within Donald Trump’s inner circle for years as a loyal supporter who shares the president-elect’s skepticism about the FBI and the intelligence community. But he is receiving new attention, from the public and from Congress, now that Trump has chosen him to lead the FBI.
As he braces for an agonizing and likely protracted Senate confirmation battle, Patel can expect criticism not only for his professed loyalty to Trump, but also for his beliefs — revealed in interviews and in his own book over the past year — that the age-old FBI should do this. be radically renewed.
Here’s a look at what he’s proposed for the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency. How much of it he would actually implement is a separate question.
Trusted news and daily treats, straight to your inbox
See for yourself: The Yodel is the source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories.
He muses about closing the FBI headquarters in Washington
The first FBI employees moved into the current headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue fifty years ago. The building has since housed the supervisors and leaders who make decisions affecting offices across the country and beyond.
But if Patel has his way, the J. Edgar Hoover Building could be closed and its employees dispersed.
“I would close the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Patel said in a September interview on the “Shawn Kelly Show.” “Then I would send the 7,000 employees who work in that building across America to chase criminals. Be police. You are police – become police.”
Such a plan would undoubtedly require legal, logistical and bureaucratic hurdles and could reflect a rhetorical flourish rather than a practical ambition.
In a book last year called “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” he proposed a more modest reform by moving the headquarters out of Washington “to prevent institutional arrests and that the FBI leadership cannot commit. in political play.”
As luck would have it, the building’s long-term fate is in flux regardless of the leadership transition. The General Services Administration selected Greenbelt, Maryland, last year as the location for a new headquarters, but current FBI Director Christopher Wray has raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the site selection process.
He has talked about finding “conspirators” in the government and the media
In an interview last year with conservative strategist Steve Bannon, Patel repeated falsehoods about President Joe Biden and a stolen election.
“We are going after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election,” Patel said. The same goes for so-called “conspirators” within the federal government, he said.
It’s not entirely clear what he has in mind, but to the extent that Patel wants to make it easier for the government to crack down on officials who reveal sensitive information and the reporters who receive it, it appears he’s seeking a reversal of the current Ministry of Justice supports. policy that generally prohibits prosecutors from seizing journalists’ data in leak investigations.
That policy was implemented in 2021 by Attorney General Merrick Garland after an uproar over the revelation that the Justice Department had obtained reporters’ phone records during the Trump administration as part of investigations into who had revealed government secrets.
Patel himself has said it has yet to be determined whether such action would be civil or criminal. His book contains several pages of former officials from the FBI, Department of Justice and other federal agencies who he claims are part of the “Executive Branch Deep State.”
Under the FBI’s own guidelines, criminal investigations cannot be based on arbitrary or unfounded speculation, but must have an authorized purpose to detect or interrupt criminal activity.
And while the FBI conducts investigations, the responsibility for filing federal charges or filing a lawsuit on behalf of the federal government falls to the Department of Justice. Trump plans to nominate former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as attorney general.
He wants a ‘big, big’ reform of supervision
Patel has been a fierce critic of the FBI’s use of its surveillance authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, calling for “major, major reforms” in his “Shawn Kelly Show” interview. Tony.”
That position puts him in line with both left-wing civil libertarians who have long been skeptical of government power and Trump supporters outraged by well-documented surveillance failures during the FBI’s investigation into possible ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign in 2016.
But it places him far removed from FBI leadership, which has emphasized the need for the bureau to maintain its ability to spy on suspected spies and terrorists even while also implementing corrective measures intended to correct past abuses.
If confirmed, Patel would take over the FBI amid ongoing debate over a particularly controversial provision of FISA, known as Section 702, which allows the U.S. to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country for the purpose of collect foreign intelligence. .
Biden signed a two-year extension of the authority in April after a fierce congressional dispute over whether the FBI could use the program to search for U.S. data. Although the FBI boasts a high compliance rate, analysts have been held responsible for a series of abuses and errors, including improperly searching its intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including a member of Congress and participants in the racial justice protests. 2020 and the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Patel has made clear his disdain for the reauthorization vote.
“Because FISA’s budget was higher this cycle, we demanded that Congress fix it. And do you know what the majority in the House of Representatives, where the Republicans did? They bent the knee. They reauthorized it,” Patel said.
In his book, Patel said a federal defense attorney should be present to argue for the rights of the accused in all FISA trials, which is a departure from the status quo.
He has called for reducing the size of the intelligence community
Patel has advocated for the reduction of the federal government’s intelligence community, including the CIA and the National Security Agency.
When it comes to the FBI, he said last year that he would support breaking off the agency’s “intel shops” from the rest of its crime-fighting activities.
It’s not clear exactly how he would want to do that, since the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operations are a core part of the agency’s mandate and budget. Wray, who has been in the role for seven years, has also recently warned of an increased threat related to international and domestic terrorism.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller faced calls from some in Congress who said the FBI should be broken up, with a new domestic intelligence agency in its wake.
The idea died, and Mueller deployed new resources to transform what for decades had been primarily a domestic law enforcement agency into an intelligence-gathering institution equally focused on countering terrorism, spies and foreign threats.
Frank Montoya Jr., a retired senior FBI official who was director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, said he disagreed with the idea of breaking up the FBI’s “intel shops” and saw it as a way to get the agency in trouble.
