Former FBI officials say Donald Trump’s pick to be the next FBI director, Kash Patel, faces the possibility of confirmation next year with no support from key Republicans and the current director’s intentions. , warned that he could have unlimited power within the department. to resign.
Mr. Patel has called for the closure of FBI headquarters and drafted what critics call an “enemies list” of his opponents, and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved his nomination. The prospect of support is ringing alarm bells.
The problem with Patel leading the agency during the second Trump administration is that the typical checks on an FBI director’s authority are largely absent, according to former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi and former officials familiar with the matter. It is certain that it will disappear.
Mr. Patel is almost certain to appoint his own chief of staff and a new FBI general counsel to authorize retaliatory operations, but Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, previously Patel’s aim was to subordinate the whites to the whites. house.
“I don’t think people really understand how powerful the FBI director is unchecked,” Figliuzzi recently said on the “Highly Conflicted” podcast. “If you want to open a case and call it a threat assessment or a preliminary investigation, you can do that.
“If the FBI director wants to hold a press conference and declare to the public that a case is opening or closing or someone should be indicted, rather than telling the Justice Department, he can do that.
“So do we look at the files? I imagine on his first day in office he’ll say, ‘I want every file that has the word Trump in it,'” Figliuzzi said. “That’s really concerning, that Kash Patel is looking at an informant’s file and saying, ‘Look, this guy spewed about Trump.'”
President Trump has appointed Patel as the next FBI director. He was dissatisfied with the current chief, Chris Wray, for failing to thwart a criminal investigation into the storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, but he expressed personal loyalty to the same commissioner. It was after I kept my faith. Distrust of the office.
Patel has no prior experience working in the agency, and his national security experience has largely been through the lens of Trump politics, including a stint on the House Intelligence Committee staff during the first President Trump’s administration. It is something that
The résumé provides no cover on whether Patel has any knowledge of how the FBI operates and whether attempts to launch a partisan political investigation would distract from other counterterrorism and criminal investigations. This has drawn criticism from former FBI officials who have questioned the matter.
Figliuzzi also said Patel could work with the Trump White House to influence background checks of first-time security applicants and reinvestigations of people previously screened by the FBI. suggested that there is.
“Investigators know how to do background checks,” Figliuzzi said. surely. What ends up on his desk and what ends up in the Oval Office may be completely different.
“That shouldn’t happen, but you know where it happens? Not only in my experience, but we’ve all seen it with the Judge Kavanaugh reinvestigation.
“If there’s going to be a reinvestigation, it’s going to apply to people who have already held federal jobs and have (investigative) experience. And guess what? They’re not. It dictates the conditions for the investigation, which is permitted.”
