Kash Out?

Why the FBI Director may be the next to go

Credit: Getty Images

The encore Donald Trump administration is packed with some of the least qualified actors ever to step foot onto the Washington stage. What they lack in experience, they more than make up for in indefatigable loyalty, Trump’s chief employment requirement.

Trump will be remembered for his promise to only hire “the best people.” That wasn’t true when he first said it a decade ago, and it’s an especially hollow pledge in his second term as he begins to jettison the sycophants who have become public embarrassments.

The gone-but-not-forgotten list begins with Kristi Noem, the former Secretary of Homeland Security. She was fired in March after the immigration fiasco in Minneapolis, where two Americans were killed on the street by federal agents. The final straw was too much self-promotion, including a $200 million ad campaign featuring Noem on horseback. Noem came to the job woefully underprepared and left under a cloud of controversy.

Then Pam Bondi was relieved of her duties at the Department of Justice after bungling the Epstein files and failing to get meaningful indictments against the president’s perceived enemies. While Bondi had prosecutorial experience, that was not her mandate. Trump just wanted a personal attorney, and she didn’t deliver. When Trump fired her, he said the former attorney general would be “transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector.”

This week, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned amidst allegations she had an inappropriate relationship with a staffer. In an official complaint, she is also accused of drinking on the job. There are allegations of sexual misconduct against her husband, who was barred from the Labor Department building, and her father, who allegedly sent inappropriate texts to staff members. Chavez-DeRemer served as the mayor of a small town in Oregon before winning one term in Congress.

Now the chatter in Washington is about who will be next to go. There are plenty of candidates within the Cabinet, but odds are increasing that it may be FBI Director Kash Patel. Since Patel took over at the FBI, the country’s premier law enforcement agency has become an organization myopically dedicated to taking down the president’s political enemies.

Patel, a former public defender with scant law enforcement experience, was a highly unusual choice to run the FBI, but one that makes sense if you want to change the FBI’s mission from protecting Americans to pursuing vengeance.

Patel is a conspiracy theorist who believes FBI agents were involved in planning the January 6 attack. He has been described as erratic, lazy, paranoid, and impulsive.

The Atlantic recently reported on his excessive drinking and frequent absences from FBI headquarters. Patel is suing the magazine for defamation, though the piece was deeply sourced.

The New York Times documented his use of government jets for vacations and his insistence that FBI SWAT teams provide round-the-clock security for his girlfriend, an unprecedented move. He didn’t like that story either and, according to the Times, ordered agents to investigate the reporter to determine if she broke federal stalking laws. The investigation was dropped.

And who can forget the video of Patel chugging beers and partying with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team after winning the gold medal in Milan? Apparently not the president. CNN reported that Trump was privately furious about the video.

The FBI is tasked with protecting the country from threats at home and abroad. “Follow the facts without fear or favor” has become a guiding principle of the FBI, to signal objectivity amidst intense political scrutiny. The agency has been trying to rebuild its reputation since the Watergate scandal, when President Richard Nixon weaponized the FBI. But Nixon’s actions with the FBI pale in comparison with those of the current president.

After Watergate, Congress stepped in to restore the agency’s credibility, but much of that has been lost since Trump took office again. On Wednesday, the Times published an investigation of the agency that found Patel’s leadership is undermining the FBI and making the country less safe. The reporters spoke with 45 current and former FBi employees.

“We found an agency that was really straining under political pressure, where the leadership was transformed into something much more partisan than anyone at the FBI had seen before, and where agents were finding themselves doing work that felt to them like it was different and at odds with their own sense of mission and purpose,” Times reporter Emily Bazelon said.

And if those inside the FBI are talking, it must be bad. The agency has long been known for its arms-length approach to the press. It’s a buttoned up bunch that used to play by the rules.

In an effort to curry favor with his boss, Patel reassigned agents who were investigating corruption, crime, drug trafficking, and terrorism to focus on the Trump retribution campaign and to assist with immigration enforcement, something the FBI has had no role in previously.

In addition, Patel has purged the agency of hundreds of agents, many of whom worked on investigations of Trump. Hundreds more have left because their ethics no longer align with those of the agency. The thousands of years of expertise that walked out the FBI’s front door during recent years can not be recovered quickly or easily — if indeed ever.

“Certain threats just aren’t getting addressed, because there’s no one there to work them. And it just makes me question, what are we missing? What threats are we not seeing?” former FBI analyst Jill Fields told the Times.

All good and frightening questions. We can add another: What threat does Patel himself pose? His personal behavior, especially his alleged public intoxication, makes him a potential target of exploitation by our enemies.

Trump chose Patel because of, not in spite of, his cocky bluster. “I want [Trump] to subpoena every government gangster that has ever called him out bogusly. We’re going to subpoena Garland, Wray. We’re going to put all of them in the hot seat,” Patel boasted.

He seems to like the term government gangster. It is also the name of his 2023 book, which includes a hit list of government officials he claims are part of the “deep state” working against Trump.

Thus far, Trump has overlooked Patel’s antics — his drinking, his repeated absences from work, his jumping to conclusions in the middle of sensitive investigations — because of the director’s dogged determination to turn the FBI into the president’s personal vendetta machine. But cracks are showing. Patel has every reason to be paranoid.

The rest of us have every reason to worry that another institution vital to the America we know is being irreparably damaged. Rebuilding these institutions will take years, if indeed they can be saved at all.

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Stay Steady,
Dan