The Case for Kash Patel as FBI Director

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A distraught anti-Trump hard left and its media choir claim debilitating flaws in Trump’s nominee for director of the FBI Kash Patel. On closer examination, however, these claimed shortcomings reveal themselves to be rare virtues.  His alleged deficiencies are a lack of management experience and his supposed goal of seeking retribution against Trump’s enemies.  But the former is a non-factor, and the latter is a deliberately perverted description of a man shown to have sagacious insight into bureaucratic dirty tricks.  He wants, in short, to return the FBI to the sterling, nonpartisan law enforcement organization that had been the envy of the world.

Has management experience been a concern with previous FBI directors?  William Webster and William Sessions were two past directors who had been sitting judges, having previously managed no more than a few law clerks.  Likewise, the main experience of past directors Robert Mueller and James Comey was prosecutorial, working with several key aides.

Patel spent fifteen years as both a federal defender and a federal prosecutor, the latter on serious national security matters.  He was also National Security Adviser to the House Committee on Intelligence.  In these latter positions, he confronted widely touted partisan hoaxes, had the wisdom to see through them, and showed the courage to speak out against the Deep State and the media.

In asserting that Patel has no institutional management experience, the resistant left ignores that there is an FBI deputy director of administration who is charged with institutional management, whereas the director’s main charge is to concentrate on major criminal and national security issues while avoiding the details of administration.  It is the director’s wise assessment of these important criminal and intelligence matters that is so important to this nation.  As part of this nonpartisan project, a new director should require political, rogue agents to behave correctly.

But it is precisely this job duty that frightens the swamp of Washington, D.C., when they fulminate against Patel’s alleged planned “retribution.”

What his opponents term “retribution,” then, is simply a loaded word for accountability.  Accountability must be the watchword when assessing FBI personnel who have used the bureau’s power not to tell the truth, but to conceal it; not to bring the political bad guys to book, but to conspire with them; not to bust partisan hoaxes, but to assist them; and not to avoid politicization, but to engage in it.

The current FBI director, Christopher Wray, has a distinguished background.  A graduate of Andover and Yale, the son of a prominent New York lawyer, Wray has been a partner in an excellent national law firm and a former assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush.  But while an appointee of a Republican administration, he understands the most salient survival skill of any D.C. Republican: see no Democrat evil.

So it is difficult to criticize Wray, a fine man, for diplomatically navigating the swamp.  But that political strength is a weakness to a majority of Americans.  In 2020, for instance, after four years of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” Wray claimed that a major FBI concern was Russian election interference.  Patel had the exact opposite assessment at the time.  He discerned that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia, but rather, far more likely, a collusion of deceit among the Clinton campaign, Russian intelligence, and a politicized FBI and CIA.  That is, it was the Democrats and the Deep State who falsely claimed Trump’s “Russian collusion” to sway the results of the election, and later to disgrace his presidency.  This campaign should sicken every patriotic American, regardless of party or persuasion.

At the very beginning of the “Russian collusion” canard, CIA director John Brennan advised the White House, on June 5, 2016, with Comey in attendance, that this was a cynical story concocted by Hillary Clinton’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, to divert attention from Clinton’s corruption of the DNC to cheat rival Bernie Sanders.

This “Russian collusion” hoax relied on former British spy Christopher Steele, the longtime agent of Putin’s favorite oligarch, Oleg Deripaska; on his sponsor, Glenn Simpson, the agent of Denis Katsyv, a Russian oligarch close to Putin; Charles Dolan, a Clintonite who had been hired by Russia as its public relations agent; Igor Danchenko, a suspected Russian spy; and Olga Galkana, a suspected Russian spy.  Comey’s FBI pursued this canard as if Trump were colluding with Putin, and not his victim, spying on, and plotting against, his boss, the president.

Yet, after it all became crystal-clear, or should have been clear, that Russia and Putin were harming Trump in league with Clinton, Wray continued to emphasize Russian election interference, which never happened beyond token bot farm postings on social media.

Patel, to his great credit, was the lone, brave voice supporting Rep. Devin Nunes in claiming that the Russian collusion narrative was simply a politicized falsehood.  Patel was the major author, along with Nunes, of a four-page memo known as the “Nunes Memo.”

Because many of the underlying facts were classified and therefore hidden from the public, Nunes and Patel faced withering fire from the D.C. establishment.  It took courage for Patel to stand his ground, while Wray comfortably stood with the naysaying horde.  Patel was ultimately proven correct, but, as these things go in D.C., no apologies were forthcoming or accountability for the canard pursued.

Later, in 2020, as the election drew near, the New York Post learned of the “laptop from hell” of Hunter Biden, inferentially damning his father as corrupt.  The FBI had the laptop for over one year, had matched the serial number to Biden, and knew with certainty its authenticity.  Yet the FBI, in months prior to the election, went to great lengths to tamp down any prospective laptop revelation that it knew was coming.  An FBI agent detailed to Silicon Valley warned Big Tech over the preceding weeks of an incoming false “Russian disinformation” election claim, clearly anticipating the laptop story.

When fifty-one present and former CIA agents later termed the laptop “potential Russian disinformation,” Wray kept silent, even though he knew that the laptop “Dirty 51 letter” was a blatant falsehood meant to influence the election.  Patel, to his frustration, was thwarted in his protestations.

Post-election polling proved that widespread publication of the laptop’s contents would have swung the election away from Biden and in Trump’s favor.  So, for these two elections, Wray revealed his tragic flaw: a troubling comfort with false, politicized narratives.

Meanwhile, Special Counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, for false Russian collusion statements to the bureau, was undercut, to Durham’s obvious frustration, by two FBI agents who had become far too close to the suspected spy, and harmed the prosecution of Danchenko immeasurably.  But Wray did not discipline either agent.

So, when the chips were down, indeed stacked against him, Patel proved himself to be a courageous, insightful truth-teller, whereas Wray was a get-along bureaucrat.  The American public deserves an FBI that returns to its roots of stiff-backed propriety, resisting any acceptance of politicization.

So when Patel’s critics claim, contrary to the nominee, that they are opposing him because they wish instead for a balanced truth-teller, whom will you believe?

John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005.  O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened

Image: Kash Patel.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.