DAVID: Hello. This is David (ph) from Chicago. I feel like, in the timestamps, that everyone’s always doing impressive stuff, like running a marathon or getting their law degree. But I’m just hanging out in my apartment, doing nothing, having a beer. This podcast was recorded at…
SUSAN DAVIS, HOST:
1:22 p.m. on Wednesday, December 11.
DAVID: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I’ll still probably just be hanging out, doing nothing. All right, enjoy the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
DAVIS: Hanging out doing nothing is one of my favorite things.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Sounds amazing.
DAVIS: We don’t get to do enough of that.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: I’m very impressed with David from Chicago.
DAVIS: Hey, there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Susan Davis. I cover politics.
LUCAS: I’m Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.
ORDOÑEZ: And I’m Franco Ordoñez. I cover the White House.
DAVIS: And today we’re looking at Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the FBI. If confirmed by the Senate for the job, Patel could have an outsized role in reshaping the nation’s top law enforcement agency. Ryan, I think in our respective households, Kash Patel is a household name…
LUCAS: Right (laughter).
DAVIS: …But I think, for most of our listeners, he’s been a man behind the scenes and not someone people know a lot about. So tell us about him. Who is Kash Patel?
LUCAS: So he’s a son of Indian immigrants who grew up in New York. He worked as a public defender in Miami for many years and ended up working as a prosecutor in the National Security Division here at main justice in Washington, D.C. From there, he ended up joining the staff of then-Congressman Devin Nunes, who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee – Republican chairman.
In that role, he ended up playing a really critical role pushing back on the Russia investigation, digging in on that and finding what they determined to be faults with how the FBI and the Justice Department conducted that investigation. And that kind of made him a folk figure on the right. He then ended up finding jobs in the Trump White House first and the National Security Council staff. And then he went on to become the deputy at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and then the chief of staff at the Pentagon. So he held some big roles in the first Trump administration.
DAVIS: Franco, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this is someone who Donald Trump trusts explicitly and very much wants in a senior role in his next administration.
ORDOÑEZ: That definitely is kind of an understatement. I mean, he’s one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants. I mean, even after he left government, he’s been by Trump’s side, whether it was with him in court in New York during his criminal trial. He was on the campaign trail, echoing Trump’s points about the deep state. Patel is kind of like the one who – really kind of emblematic of Trump’s vision. I mean, I see him – unlike some of the other picks, I feel like it’s a story less about Patel and his qualifications.
Or at least as much about that, it’s also about what it says about Trump’s plans for the next administration because Patel really has a common cause with Trump. He is someone who Trump, you know, kind of feels very similarly about. Patel, like Trump, wants to, you know, shake up Washington, really has a distrust of government agencies. And I think in Patel, he has someone who can be kind of like an enforcer to kind of do that.
LUCAS: I mean, Patel has spent a lot of time in podcasts and public speeches talking about the deep state, railing about this nefarious cabal that runs Washington, that there are unelected bureaucrats in, you know, the FBI, DOJ, CIA, Pentagon, who hold outsized influence and power and work with the mainstream media to keep the average American down, essentially.
DAVIS: Didn’t he actually put a list of names down in his own book?
LUCAS: The book called “Government Gangsters,” which is, he says, a roadmap for how to dismantle the deep state and, in essence, in his words, get the government back to – into the hands of the American people.
ORDOÑEZ: I think that’s an important point because he has written a roadmap. I mean, he is not just someone who follows Trump around and supports Trump’s vision. I mean, he does do that as well, but he has his own agenda. He has his own vision. And that is where I think Trump sees in Patel someone who can kind of execute these things because they have so much in common or at least how they view inside the beltway world.
DAVIS: Ryan, I’m glad you made reference to podcasts because I also think another thing about Patel that’s worth keeping in mind is how he is almost his own big personality within these conservative media outlets. If you think of past FBI directors – not necessarily people who tend to talk to a lot of mainstream media or certainly sort of fringier podcast, media outlets.
But he’s almost created his own persona. Like you said, he’s almost like a folk hero to the right. And in that regard, there is an element of, like, grassroots support for Patel in this position, at least from the MAGA-verse (ph), that other government officials might not normally enjoy.
LUCAS: And don’t forget about the book – the children’s book that he wrote – “The Plot Against The King,” which is all about a plot to basically overthrow a king named Donald. Yeah, that has all very much resonated with the right and Trump’s base. It’s something that – Patel spent the past four years lashing out at the deep state and, in many ways, very publicly making clear the loyalty that he has to Donald Trump and the shared vision that they have.
DAVIS: What is it exactly about the FBI that either Donald Trump and/or Kash Patel see that is so wrong with it? And have they clearly articulated what it is they want to change about the agency, other than the fact that there’s still a lot of lingering grievance with how the agency conducted investigations into Donald Trump during his first administration?
LUCAS: So first thing that I would say is it’s important to remember what the FBI does. It does a whole bunch of stuff. What we have talked about on this podcast and in the media a lot lately has been a very, very small sliver of the sort of work that the FBI does. I mean, the FBI still does a lot of counterterrorism work. There’s cybercrimes, organized crime, drugs, violent crimes, white-collar crimes, public corruption, civil rights, kidnapping, child exploitation, assassination attempts. They work with local – state and local law enforcement all the time. This is a big organization. There are 35,000-plus people who work there.
But it’s also an organization, as you noted, that has been very much in the sights of now-President-elect Trump because of certain investigations that the FBI was involved in that were looking at Trump himself. And so he – yes, he’s spent a lot of time railing against the FBI.
As for what Patel has said himself, publicly, about how he wants to change the FBI, there are a couple of things that he’s mentioned specifically. One is he’s talked about shutting down the FBI headquarters here in downtown D.C. on Day 1, making it a museum to the deep state, opening it to the public and taking the 7,000 people who work there and essentially shipping them out to the field. What…
DAVIS: Easier said than done.
LUCAS: Easier said than done. It also breaks down to a question of kind of how you want to allocate resources within the FBI. There’s been debate about that. The FBI has allocated more people to a big campus that they have in Alabama lately, in the past decade or so. There can be a policy discussion about that. He’s talked about ending illegal government surveillance on Americans. I don’t think that anyone in Congress wants illegal government surveillance on Americans.
Really, it’s what he’s said in general terms, about potentially going after perceived enemies of Donald Trump and folks in the deep state, that has caused a lot of nervousness and anxiety on the left as to whether Kash Patel, if he is confirmed as FBI director – whether he would indeed use the vast powers of the FBI to conduct such investigations.
ORDOÑEZ: I mean, Trump has such distrust of the intelligence community, you know, all those things Ryan was just talking about. And in Patel, Trump has someone who he knows will protect him, who’s not going to investigate him. He’s going to know what is going on inside the agency. And as Ryan says, he has a person who, if he wants to employ the – you know, the intelligence community for his own purposes, Patel is the kind of person who would do that.
DAVIS: All right. Let’s take a quick break. More on this in a moment.
And we’re back. And the director of the FBI is a position that has a 10-year term. The current FBI director, Chris Wray, still has a way to go before his term technically expires. But, Franco, Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants Wray to go, Patel to step in. Do you have a sense, from the Trump side of things, how confident the president is that he can get through the Senate?
ORDOÑEZ: I mean, I think they’re pretty confident right now, I mean, I think because so much of the attention is on some of the cabinet picks and not so much attention is on Patel. I think that bodes very well for Patel because, I mean, six months ago, when people were kind of, like, speculating, if Trump won, who would be, you know, part of the administration, who would have influential positions, Patel was definitely one of the names that was often brought up because of the reasons that we’ve been talking about, of being a loyal lieutenant, how being someone from Trump’s circle, the MAGA world. And in many of those, you know, discussions, Patel was seen as someone who would have a hard time being confirmed. But that’s not really talked about so much now.
Now, maybe – you know, maybe moving forward in a few weeks, that will change. You know, that’s obviously something that happens in Washington. But right now, I mean, I think, arguably, things look pretty good. And, I mean, I’d pose this question back to you, Sue, since you’re on the Hill so often, talking to senators. I mean, I guess, what’s your thought?
DAVIS: You know, I think if it was a vacuum, if Patel was the only, quote-unquote, “controversial” nominee, he might have a harder road. But if you put him in the constellation of other nominees that are fighting their way through Capitol Hill – people right now like Pete Hegseth, who’s fighting to be the defense secretary – I think Patel is in a pretty good position.
And I think one of the distinctions I would point to among these nominees is some of the folks that have issues – like former Congressman Matt Gaetz, who didn’t make it through the process to become attorney general; Hegseth, as I mentioned; former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for the director of national intelligence; even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services – they all carry with it some degree of personal baggage, whether it was things that happened in their past lives, messy marriages, political positions that are unsavory to Republican members of the Senate.
Patel doesn’t really have any of that. He shares the policy goals of the president-elect. And it’s really hard, as a member of the president’s own party, to deny a nominee, even if you don’t like the way his policy is going to play out. Donald Trump won that argument by winning an election, and there isn’t much, I would say, backbone in – among most Senate Republicans to tell a president he can’t have who he wants, especially if there’s no other sort of glaring personal or other disqualifying issue about him.
LUCAS: I would also say that conversations that I’ve had with folks on the Hill and sources elsewhere – it has become clear to me that there are a lot of Republican senators – and they’ve said it publicly, but there are also people who I’ve talked to who don’t have skin in the game at this point – have reservations about the incoming administration but who feel that the FBI needs to change…
DAVIS: Yeah.
LUCAS: …That the FBI is a broken institution and needs to be fixed. And they may have reservations about Kash Patel as an individual, but he’s someone who’s seen as a disruptor who will come in and shake things up. And perhaps the kind of critical parts of the institution will remain firm, but there needs to be a shake-up. But it’s kind of a distinction between a shake-up and a blow-up.
DAVIS: Right.
LUCAS: You don’t want to blow up the institution, but you do want to shake it up. And some of the criticisms – I mean, Chuck Grassley, the – who’s going to be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will oversee this nomination if it indeed goes forward – sent a letter this past week in which he railed against current FBI Director Chris Wray and said that he’s lost confidence in him for a whole host of reasons. What I find a little bit tricky at this point in time is to get people who are critical of the current leadership of the FBI to say specifically what it is that needs to change at the institution. Other than kind of…
DAVIS: This amorphous..
LUCAS: …This amorphous…
DAVIS: Yeah – culture, yeah.
LUCAS: There’s politicization there that’s been weaponized. But the desire for change seems to be very widespread and very real among Republican senators.
ORDOÑEZ: I’ll add one caveat. Trump did try to put Patel in a high-ranking position at the end of his first term – you know, looking to kind of gain more control of the intelligence community. Bill Barr, you know, who was Trump’s attorney general at the time, actually wrote in his memoir that he told the then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that an appointment to Patel at such a high-ranking position at the FBI would happen, quote, “over his dead body.” So I do find it fascinating how things have changed and kind of, like, the narrative has changed. But I do think that some of those things from Patel’s closet may still come up later on, as we move down the road in this process.
DAVIS: One thing I would say, too, just about the politics of Patel getting through the Senate confirmation processes – as we noted earlier, he has sort of this own popularity and cachet among the right that other nominees might not have. And I think that the risk of opposing him carries with it the potential for political blowback against any Republican senator who would want to break with the party there – that opposing Patel, to me, would be very different than being glad that Gaetz is no longer in contention or even Hegseth or any of the other people that don’t have sort of their own fandom and political following and could create a political backlash if they’re not ultimately successful in getting through the Senate.
The other point that I would kind of put to both of you is, look, like, the FBI director’s job was created with this 10-year term limit, with the grand idea of putting it above politics – right? – that it would – they would serve beyond the term of whichever president appointed them. Donald Trump has already fired one FBI director. That was James Comey during his first term. But this move and this conversation about replacing Wray – I think it also sort of eliminates the idea that the FBI director, at least under Donald Trump, is not going to be a political actor.
LUCAS: Having had conversations with former senior FBI folks and other people in Washington about this very question, one of the things that the former senior FBI official told me is that if you go in and start removing the FBI director, you are politicizing it…
DAVIS: From Day 1.
LUCAS: From Day 1.
DAVIS: Yes.
LUCAS: That’s exactly – if your complaint is politicization at the FBI, and then you bring in someone who is outwardly political, you are politicizing the organization. The 10-year term – this is also someone who thinks that Wray should be able to see out his term. The other thing is, if the Republicans lose the White House in four years, don’t think that you’re going to have Kash Patel staying on as FBI director.
DAVIS: Totally (laughter).
LUCAS: This is going to become…
DAVIS: That’s what I mean.
LUCAS: This is going to become a four-year term.
DAVIS: Yeah.
LUCAS: And every administration that comes in is going to be…
DAVIS: Yeah.
LUCAS: …Picking somebody…
DAVIS: Is that the new reality…
LUCAS: Yeah.
DAVIS: …For a job like this? All right, let’s leave it there. I’m Susan Davis. I cover politics.
LUCAS: I’m Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.
ORDOÑEZ: And I’m Franco Ordoñez. I cover the White House.
DAVIS: And thanks for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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