Tag: Shot

Two F.B.I. agents are at the door. Their faces are grim.

You invite them in, and because you work for the Pennsylvania secretary of state, you realize why they’re there. The agents explain that they “just have a few questions” about the 2020 election.

Puzzled, you agree to talk. The agents pull binders out of their bags and begin grilling you. They want to know, with precision, where you were and what you did, beginning the moment the polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020.

The conversation is difficult. They press you on the details, but your memory of those weeks isn’t as good as it once was. They catch you in a contradiction and your heart starts to beat faster.

Wait, you think. Will they think I just lied? Isn’t it a crime to lie to the F.B.I.?

The agents start to press you even harder. Every part of you is aware of the danger. You realize you need a lawyer, but you’re a normal, middle-class American. You don’t have a legal team at the ready.

But you haven’t done anything wrong. All you did was help monitor and oversee the vote count. So you try to reset the conversation. You take a deep breath and slowly describe the process, as best you remember it.

After they leave, you walk through the conversation again. You realize they were trying to pin down that, yes, you had a role in counting votes. They were very intent on establishing that you did help finalize the Pennsylvania vote tallies.

Late that night, after you’ve run the conversation through your mind again and again, a realization jolts you awake.

You’re going to be prosecuted for crimes you did not commit.

There’s a challenge in writing about the absurdity of nominating Kash Patel as F.B.I. director. There are so many reasons he is a dangerous choice to run the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency that I have trouble picking his worst qualities.

Do I highlight his commitment to conspiracy theories? He still won’t acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, and he believes the F.B.I. helped trigger the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. As Thomas Joscelyn and Norman Eisen reported in The Bulwark, Patel asked, on his podcast for The Epoch Times, “What was the F.B.I. doing planning Jan. 6 for a year?”

He has also pushed the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that a man named Ray Epps was “allowed to encourage and incite a riot in and around some of the events of Jan 6. as a government employee.”

Or should I highlight his vindictiveness? He wrote a book called “Government Gangsters” that includes a list of 60 people whom he calls a “cabal of unelected tyrants.” He posted an animated video online that portrays him as a lumberjack sawing through a log, except the log contains images of his political opponents, including Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and Pete Buttigieg. George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” plays in the background.

And he’s not just threatening members of the government. He told Donald Trump Jr. that “the legacy media has been proven to be the criminal conspirators of the government gangsters.”

In December 2023, he told Steve Bannon, “We’re going to 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.”

Or do I highlight his association with far-right extremists? He was a guest on the podcast of Stew Peters, a Holocaust minimizer and vaccine conspiracist, eight times, and while he claimed he didn’t remember who Peters was at his confirmation hearing on Thursday, he repeatedly praised Peters during his podcast appearances, telling him, “You’ve got a great show” and “always love coming on your show.”

As Andrew Egger reported in The Bulwark, one of the podcast episodes Patel appeared on was called “Vaxxed Mind Control? Zombies Advocate for WWIII With Russia to Save Zelensky’s Fake Democracy.”

Do I highlight his extreme devotion to Donald Trump? After all, he actually wrote a series of children’s books celebrating “King Donald,” who prevails against three terrible plots — the Russia investigation, the 2020 election and clashes with the Department of Justice — with the help of a mighty wizard named … Kash.

This degree of loyalty to a president is highly unusual in the F.B.I. As Garrett Graff wrote in December in a Times Opinion guest essay, “Directors, in turn, usually go out of their way to demonstrate clear independence from the presidents who appointed them.”

Graff pointed to the example of Louis Freeh, who was “so tested during the Clinton scandals that the two men weren’t even on speaking terms, and Mr. Freeh turned in his White House pass to avoid even the appearance of familiarity with the president.”

That’s not the case with Patel. No one doubts where his loyalties lie.

But there’s a problem with simply listing Patel’s scandals and crackpot ideas: They actually understate the scale of the threat Patel presents to American law enforcement and American justice. He’s no ordinary public official. He would be occupying what is by design one of the most powerful offices in the United States government, and he won’t be working alone.

In fact, the things that repel and worry so many Americans about Patel are the very things that attract so many millions of Republicans to Trump. Members of Trump’s movement would read my list above and applaud each entry. That’s what makes Patel a hero to the MAGA movement, and that’s what will help him fit seamlessly into the culture of the Trump White House.

Patel will have an enormous amount of unchecked power. F.B.I. directors have a high degree of autonomy. They have 10-year terms, and traditionally, directors serve across more than one presidential administration. The F.B.I. can initiate investigations on its own authority, Patel will be able to pick his own senior team, and usually neither the attorney general nor the deputy attorney general tends to micromanage the director of the F.B.I.

This means that Patel could, in fact, send F.B.I. agents to the homes of election workers, former members of the government who participated in the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, or anyone else Patel decides is an enemy of Trump’s.

Even if charges aren’t ultimately filed, an F.B.I. investigation can be ruinous financially, and the stress can be catastrophic. That’s exactly why a well-functioning F.B.I. doesn’t open investigations lightly (much less for purely political reasons).

Worse, the checks that do exist are already crumbling. We cannot look at Patel in isolation. He’ll ostensibly be supervised by Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, who is also an election denier.

She was one of Trump’s principal advocates in Pennsylvania. (She was even at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in 2020 and helped, according to Sky News, “rearrange the company’s landscaping equipment” before the infamous Rudy Giuliani news conference.) She also declared, “We are not going anywhere until they declare Trump won Pennsylvania,” and said that “fake ballots” were coming in late to steal the election from Trump. Oh, and she’s already defending Patel by denying that he has an “enemies list.”

At her confirmation hearing, she did say, “Mr. Patel would fall under me and the Department of Justice, and I will ensure that all laws are followed and so will he,” but given her history, those words are cold comfort.

In theory, federal prosecutors can also rein in F.B.I. excesses. The F.B.I. depends on U.S. attorneys to prosecute its cases, and ethical attorneys could refuse to engage in meritless, politically motivated prosecutions.

But that guardrail is also collapsing. The Trump administration’s decision to fire attorneys involved in the cases brought by the special counsel Jack Smith against Trump represent a breach of laws protecting federal employees from politically motivated terminations, and they send a signal to prosecutors that they have but one choice to make if they want to keep their jobs: comply with the president’s demands, no matter their ethics or their legality.

Trump’s F.B.I. also moved to replace several senior leaders even before Patel’s confirmation. This was a break with past precedent and sends the same chilling message: In Trump’s second term, loyalty is everything.

Patel’s nomination also raises serious national security concerns. The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence function means that the F.B.I. director is not only privy to highly classified information, he also works closely with allies to help maintain our mutual security obligations.

We can’t forget that Trump’s second C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, threatened to resign in 2020 rather than accept Patel as her deputy director. In his book, Bill Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general for the second half of his first term, said that Trump suggested that Patel be named deputy F.B.I. director at the end of his term, and Barr said that would happen “over my dead body.” Barr said “the very idea” that Trump would move Patel into the role of deputy F.B.I. director “showed a shocking detachment from reality.”

Patel’s confirmation hearing was a farce. His scheme was obvious. He was trying to assure senators that he shouldn’t be judged by his words and actions over the past decade. Instead, judge him by his vague assurances and empty promises of integrity and independence.

No one should be fooled. The scenario I outlined at the beginning of this column is a live possibility if Patel is confirmed.

I can remember the days when the Republican Party claimed to be the party of the American Constitution. I remember when the phrase “constitutional conservative” was a means of describing one’s commitment to the high ideals of the American founding.

One of those ideals is the separation of powers, including granting the Senate an independent “advice and consent” power, which gives it the ability to evaluate and reject a president’s nominees.

Patel was nominated for one reason and one reason only: He is one of Trump’s most zealous loyalists. But before they vote, Republican senators should take 10 minutes out of their day and read Alexander Hamilton’s words in Federalist No. 76.

If the Senate fulfills its responsibilities, Hamilton wrote, presidents would be both “ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations,” people who had no other qualification than being from the president’s state “or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

Yet loyalty and “insignificance” are Patel’s only qualifications for the job. He would never be considered for the position in the absence of his devotion to Trump, his vindictiveness and his malice.

Republican senators are heirs to a constitutional tradition that tells them they must exercise their own judgment. They should check the power of the president, especially a president of their own party.

There is no case for Kash Patel. It would be bad enough if he were merely obsequious and subservient, passively compliant to Trump’s demands. But Patel is aggressively subservient. He seeks to pursue Trump’s enemies.

Every Republican senator who votes for Patel is abdicating his or her constitutional responsibility. And for what? To please a lame-duck bully? To protect their right flank in a primary? It took immense courage to create our constitutional republic, and now immense cowardice is placing our system of justice under threat.