Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s choice to be his FBI director, is the kind of man you nominate if you intend to break something. In this case, it is what the president-elect calls the deep state. And the bureau Patel hopes to lead should brace for the worst.
“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” he told podcaster Shawn Ryan this fall. In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, he minces no words in appraising the class of officials who comprise the deep state. They are “swamp creatures,” “spiteful mandarins,” even “dirtbags.”
The media? Don’t get him started. Last year on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Patel said the next administration would “find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media; yes, we’re gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out—but yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
A decade ago, anyone who said such a thing would be disqualified from running the FBI. But for the incoming president, Patel’s hostility to official Washington is his greatest qualification for the job. And one can understand why. During Trump’s first term as president, the permanent bureaucracy did whatever it could to undermine him.
There were leaks of highly classified material. There was the FBI’s long-running, meritless investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. There was even an anonymous official in the Department of Homeland Security who published an op-ed for The New York Times boasting of how he was “part of the resistance,” working to thwart Trump’s agenda.
So it’s understandable why Trump would want someone to run the FBI who despises the deep state as much as he does. And in Patel, he has such a man. He came to Trump’s attention because in 2018, as a top aide to Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he stripped bare the bogus nature of the FBI’s Russiagate investigation. Trump then brought Patel into his national security council where, in July 2019, he became the senior director for counterterrorism. Patel ran the unit that oversaw the successful 2019 raid that eliminated ISIS leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Patel is largely correct that the labyrinth of national security bureaucracies that comprise the American deep state are in desperate need of reform. But his promises of retribution will sabotage his efforts. If he pursues vendetta after vendetta on Trump’s behalf as FBI director, he will further harm a discredited institution.
As Chris Piehota, a recently retired executive assistant director of the FBI, told The Free Press, “If you send a guy in like Kash, he’s going to run into trouble. The FBI is too important to just put it in the hands of someone to go ripping through there, and who is perceived as political.”
Patel’s reform ideas for the FBI include major changes to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approves wiretap warrants for U.S. citizens. This process was abused during Russiagate when the FBI used the infamous Steele dossier, with its false assertions, to help persuade a surveillance court judge to allow it to spy on a low-level Trump adviser named Carter Page. Two of the four warrants to eavesdrop on Page were revoked after the Justice Department’s Inspector General exposed the scandal at the end of 2019.
Patel, an attorney who has served as both a public defender and a federal prosecutor, wants to make the secret surveillance court more like other U.S. courts. Currently, there are no defense lawyers to argue against surveillance warrants because that would tip off the target of the investigation. Patel proposes that independent government lawyers go through the applications and fight on behalf of the people the FBI wants to wiretap.
Piehota, the former FBI assistant director, told The Free Press that bringing in additional lawyers and making the process more adversarial might work. But he warned that it may slow down an already ponderous process, hindering agents who need to place surveillance on a target quickly. “You have to balance out the operational agility with the oversight,” he said.
If confirmed, the most significant reform Patel is likely to push through is a reduction of excessive state secrecy. He has some experience in this. In 2020, Patel was assigned as senior adviser to the interim director of national intelligence, Ric Grenell, where he declassified many of the documents that debunked the fake scandals that plagued the first two years of the Trump administration. “A major feature of accountability is demanding the release of documents that the criminals in government arrogantly created detailing their malfeasance,” he wrote in his 2023 book.
It is hard to know whether Patel would truly consider moving the FBI headquarters out of Washington, as he told Shawn Ryan in that podcast interview—besides, he would need congressional approval. But he seems to be dead serious about wanting to strip away the bureau’s intelligence responsibilities altogether so it is focused solely on criminal investigations. That would be a major blow to the bureau’s prestige—it has tracked terrorists and communist agents successfully over the years, but has also abused its vast surveillance authorities against American citizens.
Patel’s nomination could trigger a similar dynamic in Washington from 50 years ago, when, on the heels of the Watergate scandal, the Senate created a special committee to examine the intelligence agencies. That committee disclosed a veritable scandalabra, including the FBI’s psychological warfare against Martin Luther King Jr. and the CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting prisoners and mental patients. It was the first and only time the American deep state received such a colonoscopy.
That remarkable oversight would not have been possible without the tacit cooperation of then–CIA director William Colby, who approved the release of reams of documents to the committee. Assuming a Republican-led Congress decided to embark on a similar mission—as seems likely—Patel may be the key to unlocking the next reckoning for the FBI.
Andy McCarthy, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombing, praised Patel for his work on the House Intelligence Committee. He nonetheless worried that some of the reforms proposed in his book may not work in practice. “I am more impressed by Patel’s personification of the spirit of reform, which is necessary at the FBI, than I am by the specific proposals in his book,” he said. “Patel can be a force for good if he represents the imperative of reform and develops proposals by engaging well-informed analysts, many of whom have been thinking about needed reform for years.”
What I’ve just outlined is a best-case scenario for a Patel term as FBI head. His critics in the media and elsewhere have been pointing to far more troubling signs with his nomination, and they do have a point. The fact that Patel has spoken openly about seeking retribution against deep state wrongdoers and members of the press will make his reforms much harder to achieve. To effectively improve the FBI, Patel will need allies inside the building as well as cooperation from Congress.
Dean Phillips, an outgoing Democratic congressman who challenged President Biden in the 2024 primaries, told The Free Press that he agreed with Patel’s goal to reform the FBI. But he is concerned about “the style of the person and integrity of the person charged with doing so.” Phillips is exactly the kind of independent-minded Democrat that Patel should be cultivating before he takes the reins of the FBI.
He’ll also need to stop playing the part of a bomb-thrower and start playing the part of a true reformer. But one does have to wonder if he has it in him. Consider Appendix B of Patel’s 2023 book. It is a list of members of the “executive branch deep state.” The problem with this is that it looks a lot like the kind of enemies list that got President Richard Nixon into so much trouble. Beyond that, it’s also so broad that it’s meaningless. For example, it includes Peter Sztrok, the former senior FBI agent who weaponized the Trump Russia investigation, as well as William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general. Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham as special counsel to investigate Sztrok’s probe.
Former Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur is also on Patel’s deep state list. She told The Free Press she had never met Patel and didn’t know why she was on his deep state list. “Kash clearly thinks about me and my friends a lot more than we’ve ever thought about him,” she said.
Barr declined to discuss Patel’s nomination. But he did say the problems with the FBI are similar to the corruption that many American institutions now face. “It requires restoring a commitment to the goal of these institutions and that would mean a commitment to the rule of law,” Barr said. “Now is the time to rebuild.”
Eli Lake is a columnist for The Free Press. Read his piece, “The Real Hunter Biden Scandal,” and follow him on X @EliLake.
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