FBI Director Kash Patel wants to go after President Trump’s enemies. That reminds some historians of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s notorious first director. But some say Patel wants to weaponize the FBI so completely, even Hoover would disapprove.
Guests
Beverly Gage, professor of 20th-century U.S. history at Yale University. Author of the book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, which received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Author of the New Yorker article “How Would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?”
Andrew Rice, features writer at New York Magazine. Author of the article “Vengeance Is His: The FBI is bracing for payback under Trump ultraloyalist Kash Patel.”
Frank Figliuzzi, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI.
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: J. Edgar Hoover was the first and thus far most notorious director of the FBI. He was first appointed as director of what was then known as the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. He helped found what became the FBI in 1935. Death was the only thing that could remove Hoover from that post.
When he did die in 1972, he had a combined leadership role in both bureaus for 48 years. And across those decades, communism remained one of Hoover’s greatest fears.
J. EDGAR HOOVER: Communism in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life. An evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation.
CHAKRABARTI: J. Edgar Hoover there testifying at a congressional hearing on March 27th, 1947. He goes on to say that the Communist Party was, quote, far better organized than the Nazis, end quote. He claims communists were trying to overthrow the government.
And Hoover’s goal was to destroy them. Hoover used his massive political power in that effort. In fact, he abused that power, violated some of the very laws the FBI was sworn to uphold, collected files on private citizens using illegal surveillance, and harassed and sabotaged political dissidents. We’re now 101 years after Hoover’s rise to the pinnacle of American law enforcement.
And the FBI’s newest director Kash Patel seems struck from the same paranoid political mold, but Patel doesn’t fear communists. He wants to go after the very government he recently swore to serve, or what he calls the deep state.
KASH PATEL: They have put their army on the ground in government agencies and departments from the DOD to the FBI to the DOJ.
They have weaponized justice. They have politicized the intelligence community. They have seized our Department of Defense from the men and women.
CHAKRABARTI: As Patel writes in his book, Government Gangsters, he’s a sworn enemy of what he calls rogue bureaucrats whom he believes are dedicated to destroying the American Republic. He refers to them as, quote, a cabal of unelected tyrants, end quote. Was he elected to his new FBI post as director? No. But logical consistency doesn’t really seem to matter to Kash Patel.
Radical extremism in the pursuit of people he believes are the enemy of President Trump does matter to him. The appendix of Patel’s book, for example, lists some 60 names. People such as Bill Barr, who served as Attorney General in the first Trump administration. John Bolton, former National Security Advisor, also from Trump 1.
Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s old Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She testified in the January 6th congressional investigation, and the list goes on. At the February 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference, Patel made his intentions clear.
PATEL: I’m going on a government gangster’s manhunt, who’s coming with me?
CHAKRABARTI: For the record. Patel contradicted himself fully in his Senate confirmation hearings just last month. Here he is under questioning from Democratic Senator Chris Coons about Patel’s multiple previous statements that the FBI should, quote, go after people, like former FBI Director Christopher Wray.
CHRIS COONS: Are you going to follow through on these previous statements that Director Wray needs to be prosecuted?
PATEL: Senator, this reminds me of the conversation you and I had which I greatly appreciated. There is enough violent crime in this country. And enough national security threats to this country that the FBI is going to be busy going forward preventing 100,000 overdoses, 100,000 rapes, and 17,000 homicides.
We agree that prosecuting violent crimes should be the principal focus of the FBI. What I’m trying to get to, Mr. Patel, is a whole series of very troubling, to me and many others, statements you’ve made about instead using it to pursue those who might be viewed as political opponents.
PATEL: And as I told you in your office, I have no interest, no desire, and will not, if confirmed, go backwards. There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI, should I be confirmed as the FBI director. I told you that in your office, and I’ll tell you that again today.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so there are four possibilities, as far as I can see them here. One, Patel is sincere. He has had a sudden change of heart about the sanctity of the rule of law.
Or two, he was lying to his and his Trump supporters during the campaign about wanting to go after government gangsters. Or three? He’s lying to the Senate Confirmation Committee. Or four, and I think this one is particularly interesting, Kash Patel does believe in retribution, and he does not think that using the FBI towards those means is an abusive politicization of the Bureau.
That would put him back in the company of J. Edgar Hoover.
NEWS BRIEF: Lawyers under oath to place into the record a litany of FBI dirty tricks and illegal activities conducted against the women’s movement, war protesters, civil rights groups, and individuals deemed a threat to domestic security.
CHAKRABARTI: That’s a news broadcast about the 1975 congressional investigation into the practices of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. Is Kash Patel following in Hoover’s footsteps? We couldn’t think of anyone better to turn to than Beverly Gage about this. She’s a professor of 20th century U.S. history at Yale University, author of the book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Professor Gage, welcome back to On Point.
BEVERLY GAGE: It’s great to be here, Meghna.
CHAKRABARTI: And I also want to note that you wrote a recent article in the New Yorker about exactly this issue, the Patel-Hoover nexus, if there exists one. But first of all, Beverly, could you just take us a minute or two to remind us of some of the abuses of power in more detail that were revealed after Hoover’s death?
GAGE: As you said, Hoover was the director of the bureau from 1924 to 1972.
And this was a period when the size of government and the size of the security establishment and the intelligence establishment, the FBI included, really grew dramatically and transformed its role in American life. And at the FBI, one of the things that meant was that there weren’t very many safeguards on what the FBI could do.
Not only in the realm of law enforcement, which was a little more law bound, but in the world of political intelligence. This is the moment that the FBI became our domestic intelligence force, and Hoover made it up as he went along. And he went after people that he believed were not only threats to the country, but threats to the FBI.
That meant going after the Communist Party, as your introduction suggested. It meant going after people who criticized the Bureau. And it meant summoning a whole sense of righteousness that justified what the FBI often described as openly illegal activity. Breaking and entering, disruption aimed at all sorts of political organizations and movements and individuals who actually were not doing anything to break the law.
And the FBI itself never suggested that they were.
CHAKRABARTI: How did Hoover then define who these people were? Was it just groups that he personally disliked?
GAGE: Sometimes it was groups that he personally disliked. For instance, members of the press who criticized the FBI would be cut off from access to any bureau information and would be investigated themselves.
Hoover would find information about their private lives, about their personal enemies. Sometimes Hoover was going after extremely unpopular groups like the communist party. And if you look at the red scare of the ’40s and ’50s, Hoover was certainly at the cutting edge of that, doing many things that were in some sense secret.
But that was a pretty widespread sentiment, anti-communism of the Cold War. And so I think Hoover did have some sense of the public opinion and public sentiment. And then in the ’60s and ’70s, he spent a lot of time taking these techniques that had been pioneered and going after the Communist Party to go after a really vast range of actors in American political life.
One of the most famous is the FBI’s investigation into Martin Luther King, which became this really gargantuan, surveillance and discrediting and disruptive operation, aimed at someone who first of all, wasn’t breaking the law. And secondly, was really trying to make the United States live up to its promises of equality.
CHAKRABARTI: As we’ve been talking about, there was that 1975 congressional investigation into the practices of the FBI. And some of the worst offenses by the Bureau were revealed to be directed at civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. They not only had a file on King, the FBI even wiretapped his bedroom.
So here’s lawyer Frederic Schwartz again, this is in the 75th Congressional hearing, describing that, and a letter that the FBI sent to King in 1964 telling him to commit suicide.
The Bureau went so far as to mail anonymous letters to Dr. King and his wife, which were mailed shortly before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and finishes with this suggestion:
‘King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it.’ This exact number has been selected for a specific reason. It has definite practical significance. It was 34 days before the award. You are done.
CHAKRABARTI: 34 days before he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In a few minutes, of course, we’re going to talk specifically about whether there’s a sort of a paranoid and political link, as I said, between Hoover and Kash Patel. Beverly, help us understand one thing. We’ve got a minute to go before the break here. Did Hoover sincerely believe that the actions he was taking as bureau director were in the best interests of the nation?
GAGE: I think that he did believe that, but as his career went on, it became almost impossible for him to identify the difference between, What was a matter of national security? What was a matter of protecting the public? What was a matter of protecting the FBI and its reputation? And what was a matter of protecting his own power?
And so I really think his career is in many ways a case study in what can go wrong when you feel so righteous and so sure that you are correct.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: Let’s listen to a little bit more from Kash Patel himself. This is from a 2023 interview on Roger Stone’s podcast, where Patel is very explicit about what he says he wants to do with the quote, deep state.
PATEL: And when we win in 2024 with President Trump as the leader. Then we come back and prosecute every single one of them for continuing the criminal conspiracy that they started from Russiagate and walked all the way through Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden, and January 6th, and John Durham’s cover up of the Russiagate probe, and we get them all for lying at least to Congress, if not a conspiracy charge, when we have the executive branch again.
CHAKRABARTI: That’s Patel in 2023. Just last month, after being sworn in as the FBI’s newest director, this happened on February 21st, Kash Patel held a brief press conference, and here’s what he said.
PATEL: To the senators and the men and women of the United States House of Representatives, you placed an enormous trust in me, an enormous leap of faith, one that I didn’t know that I could possibly earn back, but I’m going to spend every single day on this job doing so.
I promise you the following. There will be accountability within the FBI and outside of the FBI. And we will do it through rigorous constitutional oversight starting this weekend.
CHAKRABARTI: FBI Director Kash Patel on February 21st. Andrew Rice joins us now. He’s a features writer for New York Magazine and author of “Vengeance Is His: The FBI is bracing for payback under Trump ultraloyalist Kash Patel.” Andrew welcome to On Point.
ANDREW RICE: Hi, thanks.
CHAKRABARTI: How do you interpret that clip that we just played of Patel from February 21st when he talks about, I didn’t know I could possibly earn back the trust of Congress?
RICE: I think that it all has to be placed in the context of, I think that he and the administration were anticipating that his confirmation hearing would be a difficult one.
It turned out to be less difficult than anticipated, but there’s a lot of anticipation, even within the transition and what later became the Trump White House, that many of these statements that Patel had made publicly about dismantling the Deep State, about dismantling the FBI, calling the leadership of the FBI criminals, and suggesting, in fact, that they should be criminally investigated.
I think there was some belief that would make it difficult to confirm him, but it didn’t turn out that way.
CHAKRABARTI: Does that make sense to you?
RICE: That it didn’t? I think it’s reflective of, in general, of how much Trump has managed to move the goalposts in terms of what’s considered acceptable for political appointments, and I think that within that context it’s not that surprising that Patel was confirmed, because he wants Patel.
CHAKRABARTI: I think we’ve seen over and over again in the first Trump administration and now even in the first two months of the second Trump administration, that many people look upon the actions of the administration and say they said a lot of things during the campaign, because that’s what you got to say to win, but it’s not actually going to happen.
They won’t carry these things out. And then when they do. Tariffs, the gutting of the federal civil service, et cetera. You get a lot of concerned nods from, let’s say, some of the more moderate members of the Republican caucus who say, yes, I’m quite concerned by these actions, but it shouldn’t be a surprise anymore.
So what is it that Patel has said in the past couple of years, Andrew, that you think he is actually very likely to carry out, or is already carrying out at the FBI.
RICE: I think just to gently point back, push back a little bit on the premise. I think, I don’t even think that these things about dismantling the FBI or bringing prosecutions against political opponents, these weren’t things that Donald Trump said to win there, there are things that were, I think, objectively unpopular with voters and in fact, probably hurt his chances of being elected.
He said them because he felt very strongly that he had been targeted for political prosecutions by the Biden administration and so on. And so therefore he nominated somebody to lead the FBI to replace his own previously FBI director Christopher Wray who displeased him by doing things that he felt were contrary to his interests.
He appointed someone who he knew would be loyal to him and someone that he could anticipate would be willing to do his bidding. So I think that to answer your question, I think that we should take quite seriously what Kash Patel has said that he wants to do, because it happens to match with what Donald Trump has said he wants to do.
And we’ve seen thus far over the course of the first month or two of this administration, that Donald Trump is very willing and very much intends to go through with everything that he says that he says he’s wanted to do.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay here’s President Trump himself just last night in his address to Congress.
He specifically saluted Patel, who was in the chamber. Something unusual for FBI directors, because, of course, they’re supposed to remain nonpartisan.
DONALD TRUMP: Our justice system has been turned upside down by radical left lunatics. Many jurisdictions virtually seized enforcing the law against dangerous repeat offenders. While weaponizing law enforcement against political opponents like me, my administration has acted swiftly and decisively to restore fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law, starting at the FBI and the DOJ, Pam, good luck. Kash, wherever you may be, good luck.
Good luck. Pam Bondi, good luck. (APPLAUSE) So important. Gonna do a great job. Kash, thank you. Thank you, Kash.
CHAKRABARTI: President Trump in his address to Congress last night, Beverly Gage, it seems as if the analogy is clear, right? Highly political, virtually paranoid, seeing that there’s enemies of the state lurking behind every corner, highly loyal as well.
Do you think, but you think that Patel actually isn’t following in the footsteps of Hoover? Why is that?
GAGE: I’d say that he is, and he isn’t. He is certainly following in Hoover’s footsteps in the sense that Hoover really wrote the playbook for how you can take an institution like the FBI and weaponize it against those you don’t like.
Whether that’s your personal enemies, your political enemies, your ideological enemies, movements that you don’t like, but to put it simply, Hoover was the deep state. He believed in the power of unelected bureaucrats like himself. He believed in the idea of a professional civil service that was supposed to stand outside of politics, that was supposed to, in fact, hold politicians and other figures accountable.
Now, he didn’t always do that perfectly, but it was an essential part of his public identity, of the FBI’s public identity, is still a really essential part of the FBI’s culture. Whereas Patel is someone who has openly said that he wants to tear down the FBI, that he is an enemy of the quote-unquote deep state.
And so I think we can see him as someone who not only wants to dismantle this institution, but also who is an enemy of the very idea of a civil service that is professional and expert and outside of politics, that is there to hold the people in power accountable to the law, the Constitution and the public.
CHAKRABARTI: Here’s Patel speaking quite clearly about exactly that. He was on the Shawn Ryan podcast in December of 2024. And this is a moment in which he lays out what he wants to do with the very building that the FBI is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
PATEL: I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state.
And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here?
CHAKRABARTI: Andrew Rice, your thoughts on that?
RICE: I think that he has said that was a that was a hyperbolic proposal, although he made it many times. He did it on other podcasts as well, including Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast. I think it’s safe to say that we don’t have to worry about Kash Patel shutting down FBI headquarters, what might be more concerning is what he will do inside FBI headquarters now that he’s at the controls of the machine.
As Beverly’s book demonstrates quite persuasively, the powers of the FBI and of its director are immense, their powers to surveil, their powers to investigate people, their powers to ultimately interrogate and arrest people if they can get a judge to sign off on it, and the amount of predication necessary in order to open an investigation is relatively low.
And so therefore I think that one thing that we need to, that bears watching is whether the FBI, whether Patel takes steps within the FBI to begin investigations of people that Donald Trump has suggested he wants investigated.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I think we’re hitting a key point here and I’ll just be frank. I am utterly cynical that anybody who is granted that much power is going to take actions to essentially disempower themselves, right? To take down the very institution that they have been charged to lead. Most of all, most of the time in politics, what happens is power accrues power.
So when Patel is talking about taking down the deep state. Andrew, I think what you’re saying is he just wants to take down people that he doesn’t like, or he thinks have been disloyal to Donald Trump. He’s forming a Trumpian deep state instead. Is that a fair reading of Kash Patel’s intentions?
RICE: We don’t have to look for implications. Donald Trump said this himself at CPAC a couple weeks ago, that, basically, that Joe Biden tried to use lawfare against him. And now Joe Biden is going to find out what lawfare feels like. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the substance of what he said.
And so I think they’re being very clear that they want to use the same coercive functions of the state and point them in the other direction, whether there’s as much justification for turning those coercive powers of the state against the Democrats as there was for turning against a group of people that staged an insurrection against the Capitol.
That’s a big question, a big political question, I’d say that I think that it’s clear what Donald Trump wants to do.
CHAKRABARTI: In a few minutes, we need to talk about Kash Patel’s role in January 6th as well. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. This is On Point.
Beverly Gage, let me ask you, what are the consistent criticisms or accusations that Patel has issued against the quote-unquote deep state, or the FBI even specifically is that he believes it’s full of leftist radicals, leftist loonies. This is quite a, I would say, unique criticism of the FBI and the Bureau’s history.
GAGE: That’s right. It’s the fairly absurd claim that the FBI is secretly full of closet Marxists who are seeking to tear down the nation from within. So I think we can pretty safely say that’s not true. But part of what is happening, I think, in a claim like that is a vision in which anyone who is critical of Donald Trump, of the January 6th rioters, becomes defined as an enemy of the nation, and it’s under those kinds of circumstances that the mobilization of the FBI as a kind of political enforcement force can come into being.
And I think that Patel has talked, as has Trump, about prosecuting his enemies, and maybe that will happen, but it’s actually hard to prosecute people often, if they haven’t committed a crime, I actually think the greater danger is going to come in the world of intelligence, where things can be done secretly, where people under investigation don’t even necessarily know that they are under surveillance, that their phone is being tapped, that their hotel rooms are being bugged, all of these things that Hoover’s institution did often with impunity and which gave many people who were the targets of it a really strange experience of kind of knowing that they were under scrutiny, but not knowing whether, for instance, when they’re being audited by the IRS, or they get that traffic ticket, or not knowing whether their friends and comrades and coworkers are reliable or informing on them. I think those are very powerful.
They’re very secret. And they’re the sorts of things that a pretty small group of people within an institution like the FBI could carry out pretty easily.
CHAKRABARTI: Beverly, we only have you for a couple more minutes and I’d like to get one last sort of lessons learned from the Hoover era.
We were talking about the 1975 congressional investigation into Hoover’s action as leader of the FBI, but he was in that position, as we mentioned earlier, as the head of America’s domestic intelligence agencies for 48 years. Why did Congress not act before Hoover died?
GAGE: I think some of it was fear that Hoover kept files on congressmen and presidents, like he did on many other people.
But I also think that many people found Hoover quite useful. And if you look at the presidents, he served under four Democrats, four Republicans. And so whatever you want to say of Hoover, he was not an especially partisan figure, right? He’s very different from Patel. He’s not loyal to any given political figure.
But he lasted so long, I think, because he was, in fact, quite useful to those presidents. And sometimes he was doing things that they wanted him to do, but that they wanted done in secret.
CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. So in a sense, his nonpartisan paranoia is one of the things that kept him as head of the FBI for so long.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Today we’re talking about the FBI’s new director, Kash Patel and whether he’s following in the footsteps of the FBI’s longest serving and most notorious director, J. Edgar Hoover. I’m joined today by Andrew Rice. He’s a features writer at New York Magazine and author of “Vengeance Is His: The FBI is bracing for payback under Trump ultraloyalist Kash Patel.”
And about that loyalist part of Patel’s personality regarding President Trump. Listen to this. This is last year on the podcast, The War Room, which is of course hosted by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. And Kash Patel says that his goal is to have only Trump loyalists in the government.
PATEL: The one thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go around is we got to put in all America patriots top to bottom and we got them for law enforcement.
We got them for intel collection. We got them for offensive operations. We got them for DOD, CIA. Everywhere. We will go out and 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 gonna come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly. We’ll figure that out.
CHAKRABARTI: Kash Patel on Steve Bannon’s podcast, The War Room. There’s no evidence there was any rigging in the 2020 election, where Patel mentions Joe Biden there. Andrew Rice, I’d like to just hear a little bit more from you about some of the salient points of Patel’s own biography.
Because, when we read his book, Government Gangsters, it almost reads like a laundry list of Republican grievance talking points. There’s everything from Benghazi to the Steele dossier, Hunter Biden’s laptop, critical race theory. What other aspects of him do you think we need to know in order to understand what he might do at the FBI?
RICE: I think in order to understand him and his role within the Trump administration. I think it’s important to understand where he comes from and how he thinks of himself. He is a child of immigrants; his father was expelled from Uganda in 1972 by a demagogic dictator Idi Amin, eventually settled in Garden City, Long Island.
And he’s very much, I would say a Long Island guy, he plays hockey. He went to the University of Richmond, and to Pace Law School. Both fine institutions, but not Ivy League caliber institutions of the sort that people who oftentimes end up in top jobs in the Department of Justice go to.
He became a public defender in Florida, which is actually an interesting chapter for an FBI director. He defended drug kingpins and murderers and other people and says he developed a real skepticism of prosecutorial misconduct from that experience.
Ultimately, he ended up working as a prosecutor in the Department of Justice in the National Security Division and did real serious work on terrorism cases, for instance, on investigating a terrorist bombing again in Uganda. And in 2010 during the world, after the world, the bombing took place during the World Cup Final.
And but at some point, he seems to have shifted, and I think, you can talk to people who worked with him at the DOJ who say that he got frustrated because he was a bit of a, considered a bit of an iconoclast or a guy who didn’t play exactly by the rules of the buttoned up main Justice Department.
He eventually found his rise there, he wasn’t going to rise any further and ended up deciding to go into government working for Devin Nunes, the House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman during the Russia investigation. Really from there, that’s where he became a Trump loyalist.
CHAKRABARTI: It’s interesting that his family was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin because one would think that would lead the son of immigrants who suffered that to have some skepticism about demagogic power or the kind of demagogic power that President Trump seems to want to amass.
But maybe in Patel’s case, it made him that much more critical of what he sees, what he believes is extant demagogic power and what he calls the deep state. Here’s another example, because Kash Patel in his Senate confirmation hearing, he was questioned by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat, on a statement that Patel had made back in 2022, claiming that the FBI planned the January 6th attack on Congress.
And here’s a bit from that exchange.
DICK DURBIN: What the inspector general came back with was, quote, there is no evidence that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds or at the Capitol on January 6th. No evidence.
PATEL: And there’s a huge distinction between undercover employees and sources.
I know, because I ran them. And anybody in law enforcement knows that, too.
DURBIN: So you think the FBI was planning January 6th for months ahead of time?
PATEL: Once again, that’s not what I said.
DURBIN: Yes, read your own words, maybe that’s a good starting point.
CHAKRABARTI: Let’s bring Frank Figliuzzi into the conversation. He’s the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI.
Frank, welcome back to On Point.
FRANK FIGLIUZZI: My pleasure.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, first respond to this allegation that Kash Patel has made in the past about the FBI’s alleged, his saying they have an alleged role in January 6th.
FIGLIUZZI: Yeah, it’s actually quite similar to the same assertions that his new deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, has made repeatedly on his own podcast.
So I’d reiterate what we’ve already heard, which was this has been investigated every which way it can. The best anyone could come up with is that there may have been FBI informants, there were sources there. I would expect that to be the case when you have domestic terror organizations like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers present at a large, significant national event.
But yet no evidence that there’s any planning or political nature to the FBI’s response to January 6th.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Frank, I’m going to come back to you about, for more of your insights on the FBI in just a second. But since we’re on January 6th, Andrew Rice, take a quick minute to remind us what Kash Patel’s role was in the Department of Defense on January 6th.
RICE: So Kash Patel was sent over to the Department of Defense after the election was declared for Joe Biden. Donald Trump sent him and then fired the defense secretary and sent a new defense secretary and acting secretary over there with Kash Patel as his chief of staff.
And suffice to say, during that time period, there was a lot of tension within the Defense Department, a lot of concerns about potentially the use of the military in ways that were not constitutional. And ultimately Patel was part of a group that on January 6th, were in the Pentagon.
Trying to respond in real time to the insurrection and ultimately, he was involved with getting the National Guard out on the streets to secure the Capitol and to clear it of rioters so that the certification could proceed.
CHAKRABARTI: Frank, let me turn back to you then. Do you, and let’s lean on your experience as a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI.
Do you think Kash Patel has already made changes in the first few days of him being FBI director, that have had an impact on domestic law enforcement?
FIGLIUZZI: So we’re not aware yet. I’m not aware yet of publicly known changes that are occurring inside the FBI, we’ve heard some very minor surface things.
Of course, people being removed from the seventh floor, which is the executive floor. He’s basically decapitated senior leadership, and they’re gone at the executive assistant director level. A couple of field office leaders are gone, in particular, New York and Washington field office, as well as Miami and Las Vegas.
We’ve heard minor things, like you don’t have to wear a suit anymore, but we’ve not heard anything significant. And I think that itself raises the question of when we would find out, particularly on the national security side of the House, the counter intel, the counter terrorism, that act largely within classified files.
And when would we know? It’s like the Hoover comparison, only during the church committee in Congress and after Hoover’s death did we truly find out the length to which Hoover abused and even crossed the line into unlawful activity. So that’s a concern.
CHAKRABARTI: So thank you for bringing J. Edgar Hoover back into this conversation. Because one would presume that after those congressional investigations, as you just mentioned again, that there would be very strict guidelines within the FBI about when investigations can be launched, or limits to the amount of surveillance when, how, and of whom that were put in place because of Hoover’s activities.
Is that the case?
CHAKRABARTI: So I caution people, and I’ve been doing this repeatedly in the last several days, about the assumption that guidelines put in place after Hoover will largely prevent or mitigate against the abuses of Hoover. And here’s why. First, there’s a clue in the name of these rules.
They’re called guidelines, not mandates. Number two, the criteria or predication you need to open a case, even under the guidelines, is very low. So there’s something called a threat assessment that was created after 9/11 that allows agents to really jump into the investigative mode while they’re assessing a perceived threat.
The next level up is something called a preliminary inquiry. Do you know what you need to open a preliminary investigation on an American citizen? You need nothing more than quote, reasonable suspicion, unquote. And what can you do under a PI? A heck of a lot. You can do a mail cover, meaning you can look at the outside of the mail envelopes being received, and sent by your target.
You can conduct surveillance. You can develop an informant against your target. You can do a trash cover, meaning take their abandoned trash and go through it. All of this under the lowest form of investigation in the FBI.
CHAKRABARTI: Andrew Rice.
RICE: I think that the primary safeguard, Frank obviously served in the institution himself, but my sense of it is that the primary of guard that, that was the key to the post Hoover reforms was not in fact any written rule at all, but a kind of presumption that the person who would run the FBI as director, the only political appointee at the FBI, is the director, and that those political appointees would serve 10 year terms.
They would serve multiple presidents, presumably presidents of both parties. And if you look at the history of all those individuals, they’re all people who served as judges in the cases as Louis Freeh or Webster. Or were U. S. Attorneys in the case of Bob Mueller or Jim Comey, served as the head of the criminal division in the Justice Department in the case of Chris Wray.
These were all people who had these very nonpartisan, highly respected histories within law enforcement, apolitical histories. So the idea of appointing somebody like Kash Patel, who speaks at rallies for Trump, who appeared at his State of the Union address last night, as you mentioned.
In support of him, this is something that is extremely, just such a huge departure from the last four decades or whatever of FBI directors.
CHAKRABARTI: Andrew Rice, feature writers at New York Magazine and author of “Vengeance Is His: The FBI is bracing for payback under Trump ultraloyalist Kash Patel.”
We have a link to that article, by the way, at onpoint.wbur.org. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us.
RICE: Of course.
CHAKRABARTI: Frank, I’d like to spend the last couple of minutes digging deep into the institution of the FBI with you. First and foremost, let’s be honest, the FBI isn’t exactly an institution that’s got a perfect track record, right?
It has come under criticism historically from the left in terms of being in need of reform. So if we could just put Patel aside for just a second, A, do you agree with that? That the Bureau could use some reform and B, what would Frank Figliuzzi do?
FIGLIUZZI: Yeah, look, when you’re dealing with a bureaucracy of About 38,000 employees, 14,000 of which carry guns and badges.
You should be in the constant mode of looking to tweak reform, adopt best practices and much of what the FBI does is geared toward that. For example, there’s an inspection division that rigorously audits each and every division, field office, and looks for violations, looks for best practices.
Similarly, there’s an office of professional responsibility. I was a chief in an adjudication unit within OPR that looked at misconduct and addressed it within the FBI. And this goes on and on, not to mention the inspector general at DOJ, which interestingly, Trump has kept on at least for now. So yes, what would I do?
I would be looking at the decision making that went into January 6th missing the intel. Not that the intel wasn’t there, but rather not paying attention to it. I’d want to know more about how that happened. I’d want to know more about the domestic terrorism programs because that involves American people.
And we’ve got to ensure that civil liberties and freedom of speech and assembly are preserved. There’s these two hats of the FBI and it seems to me that Patel has focused on the intelligence side. He said something like the problem is on the, with quote, those intelligence units. Now, I don’t know what he meant by that, but he might be saying that there’s too much freedom and license to look into a threat based on nothing more than a hunch. And that’s really what J. Edgar Hoover did. If you recall,
he claimed to even presidents and attorneys general that MLK was a communist party member. That evidence never developed. There’s ways to do this that can eliminate too much administrative bureaucracy.
And yes, are there too many people in the Hoover building? There could be. Is the answer to close it down? No.
CHAKRABARTI: But Frank, a quick yes, no, though, because I’m not quite sure I hear what you’re saying. Do you think that the FBI is possibly in the position to be the most weaponized it’s ever been under Patel?
FIGLIUZZI: I think, yes. And I think we’re in for the potential to see more and greater abuses than we saw under J. Edgar Hoover.
