Kash Patel as FBI director would lead to a constitutional crisis greater than Watergate
Several Republican lawmakers fell in line on Sunday behind President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plan to choose Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I., defending the incoming president’s right to install a loyalist who has vowed to use the position to exact revenge on Mr. Trump’s adversaries.
Mr. Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he intends to replace Christopher A. Wray, the current F.B.I. director, who still has three years left on his 10-year term, with Mr. Patel has stunned Democrats and many in the national security establishment. Mr. Patel has said he would launch a sweeping campaign of retribution against F.B.I. agents, journalists and others.
F.B.I. directors are confirmed by the Senate, and Mr. Patel is likely to face tough questions at his confirmation hearings about whether the agency would remain free from political interference. While Republican Senate leaders remained quiet on Sunday, other senators in Mr. Trump’s party expressed their support. [Continue reading…]
FBI directors wield awesome powers over the liberties of Americans. The unwritten rule governing their appointment—no dismissal except for compelling cause—bulwarked American law and freedom for half a century. Even first-term Trump dared not openly defy it. But second-term Trump is opening with a bid to junk it altogether. Much of the reporting on Trump’s announcement reveals a society already bending to Trump’s will: Something that was regarded as outrageously unacceptable in 2017—treating an FBI director as just another Trump aide—has been semi-normalized even before President-Elect Trump takes office.
The firing of Wray is the real outrage. The obnoxious nomination of Patel slathers frosting and sprinkles on the outrage.
Maybe the Patel nomination will fail, as Trump’s attempt to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general failed. If Patel falters, maybe Trump will fall back on a somewhat more respectable candidate. That second candidate may be greeted with relief. But the essential harm will be done by the firing of Wray, not the hiring of Patel (or whoever ultimately gets the job). Already, not a month since the closest election by popular-vote margin in two generations, we are witnessing, throughout law-enforcement and the national-security agencies, a pattern of Trump’s trashing institutions and replacing them with whim. Trump is declaring his intention to reinvent the FBI as something it has never been before: an instrument of personal presidential power, which will investigate (or refrain from investigating) and lay charges (or refrain from laying charges) as the president wishes. [Continue reading…]
Former national security adviser John Bolton compared Kash Patel, President-elect Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, to one of the former Soviet Union’s most feared secret police chiefs, Lavrentiy Beria.
“Trump has nominated Kash Patel to be his Lavrentiy Beria,” Bolton said in a statement to NBC News’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday. “Fortunately, the FBI is not the NKVD. The Senate should reject this nomination 100-0.”
NKVD refers to the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union, which was in place from 1934 to 1946.
Beria was appointed by former Soviet Union Prime Minister Joseph Stalin as deputy chief of the Soviet secret police and was head of the Soviet atomic bomb project, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. He is known for his violent tactics, including kidnapping, torture and rape, which he used to advance within the ranks of the secret police. At the time, Soviet leaders reportedly feared that Beria would use his control of the secret police to fully seize power. [Continue reading…]