KASH PATEL, ONETIME FBI TARGET, NOW ON TRACK TO RUN THE FBI. Not long ago, a left-wing journalist argued that when Republicans describe Kash Patel’s nomination to be FBI director as a way to “clean out” the FBI and “restore its integrity,” they are in fact creating “cover to go along with Trump’s scheme to unleash the FBI on enemies.”
It’s a common criticism in anti-Trump circles. But it raises a question. Where were these people in 2017, 2018, and after? If one wants to discuss the prospect of a new director unleashing the FBI on enemies, shouldn’t he grapple with the reality of years of bureau leadership unleashing the FBI on enemies?
During the Trump years, FBI directors and other top law enforcement and intelligence officials did the following:
1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates.
2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers.
3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering.
4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser.
5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States.
6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research.
7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.
8) Ambushed the national security adviser with wiretap information on the pretense of a Logan Act violation.
9) Misled/stonewalled Congress on the investigation of the president.
10) Misled the president about the investigation targeting him.
The first item, of course, refers to the FBI investigations of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. The big difference between them was that the then-FBI director, James Comey, planned to exonerate Clinton before interviewing her or other key witnesses in the email case. There was no such intent to exonerate in the Trump investigation.
Many of the other examples, numbers 2 through 10, refer to the Trump-Russia investigation, in which bureau leadership unleashed the FBI on an enemy — the presidential candidate and then President Trump. Democrats cheered them on from Congress, where they hoped a Trump-Russia special counsel investigation, led by a former FBI director, would give them a case for impeaching Trump. (It didn’t, but Democrats quickly changed gears and impeached Trump for something else.)
Another thing the FBI did was stonewall the congressional leaders who had the authority and responsibility to oversee the FBI. When in the final months of the 2016 campaign and the first months of Trump’s presidency members of Congress began to realize how intensely the FBI had targeted Trump, they wanted to know what was going on. They had a right to know. But the FBI and the Justice Department told them to get lost.
One of those congressional investigators was Kash Patel, who at the time was working for then-Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Patel was looking into the provenance of the Steele dossier, which was the compilation of false and incendiary allegations that, among other things, Trump was involved in a “well-developed conspiracy” with Russia to fix the 2016 election and that Russian intelligence had hidden camera video of Trump engaged in kinky sex with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
The dossier is the heart of items 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 above. It is called “opposition research” because it was; we later learned it was compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who was hired and paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, working through the Democratic fixer Marc Elias and an oppo research firm called Fusion GPS. The FBI liked Steele’s material so much that it hired him, used some of its allegations before a secret national security court, and later ambushed President-elect Trump with the Moscow hotel story.
How did we learn that? One key moment occurred when Jason Foster, an investigator for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was pursuing the dossier matter at the same time Patel was in the House. Foster recently told the story of how he received a tip that the name Fusion GPS was actually an alias for a company legally known as “Bean, LLC.” Its bank accounts were under “Bean, LLC.” Senate rules made it very difficult for Grassley to issue a subpoena for the bank information, but House rules made it relatively easy for Nunes to issue a House subpoena.
And that is what Nunes and Patel did. After the requisite court fight, Patel got to see the “Bean, LLC” records, and the story came out. Just the dossier story — and as important as it was, there was more to the Trump-Russia investigation than that — showed an FBI unleashed on enemies in a way reminiscent of the legendary and notorious J. Edgar Hoover.
Nunes and Grassley kept pushing the FBI for information. They asked. They emphatically asked. They demanded. They emphatically demanded. And they subpoenaed. The FBI and the Justice Department resisted them at every step of the way. And to top it off, we much later learned that the FBI had gotten the phone and email records of both Patel and Foster, among others. That’s what can happen if you dare to question the FBI, even if you are doing so on behalf of the chairmen of House and Senate committees.
The bureau at the time was run by Obama nominee James Comey, but the Justice Department was run by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Trump appointee.
“Being stonewalled by the FBI in 2017-2018 was typical, given how administrations of both parties resist oversight,” Foster told me in a text conversation. “But the alignment of Democrats, the media, and Trump appointees like [post-Comey FBI Director Christopher] Wray and [top Justice Department official Rod] Rosenstein to shield law enforcement and intel agencies from the scrutiny they clearly needed was shocking. To discover six years later that they collected my phone and email records while I worked to expose their abuses — that’s Orwellian.”
Remember — the important thing is not that the FBI, to cover up its misdeeds, told Patel to get lost. The important thing is that the FBI, in order to cover up its misdeeds, told the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to get lost. And then they told the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to get lost. The bureau was so headstrong and confident in its ability to do what it wanted without supervision that it blew off the elected congressional officials charged with overseeing the FBI.
Now, however, much of the political world has become concerned that the FBI, under Director Patel, would target political enemies. Imagine that! If he did, he would be keeping a tradition of the Trump era — one that was cheered on in many corners of the media. But one might just as well say that Patel will not target political enemies given that he himself was targeted.
None of that means Patel has the perfect experience and skill set to lead the FBI. That is hard to know ahead of time, although we do know he has been a public defender — an experience one would think liberal Democrats would appreciate in an FBI director — a Justice Department attorney, and a senior congressional aide, as well as serving brief stints as a senior official at the National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Defense.
And we know for sure that the FBI desperately needs reform. If the Trump years proved anything, it is that the entrenched bureaucracy of the bureau and the Justice Department needs shaking up. Of course Democrats will oppose the Patel nomination, mostly because it was made by Trump. But Republicans appear ready to support the idea that the FBI needs a change agent, and Patel is the change agent the president-elect has chosen.
“The FBI perpetuated the Russia collusion hoax, tried to cover it up, and spied on Kash and others who investigated their malfeasance,” Nunes told me in a text exchange. “The FBI are experts in avoiding accountability by over-classifying information, stonewalling Congress, and running information warfare operations against their constitutionally-mandated overseers. Their entire culture needs to be upended, and Kash has the guts to do it.”