How Does Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?

Summary

Podcast Summary: "How Does Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?"

Podcast Information:

• Title: On the Media
• Host/Author: WNYC Studios
• Episode: How Does Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?
• Release Date: March 5, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of On the Media, host Michael Owinger engages in a compelling discussion with Beverly Gage, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. The conversation delves into the parallels and contrasts between Kash Patel, the newly appointed FBI Director, and the infamous J. Edgar Hoover, exploring the implications for the future of the FBI and American democracy.

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Kash Patel’s Ambitious Vision for the FBI

The episode opens with a stark portrayal of Kash Patel’s ambitions for the FBI. Patel, prior to his appointment as FBI Director, outlined radical plans intended to transform the agency:

Beverly Gage [01:11]: “I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building and I'd take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals, go be cops. We're gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're gonna come after you whether it's criminally or civilly. We'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on.”

This declaration drew immediate concern among pundits and Democrats, who warned of a potential return to the authoritarian practices reminiscent of Hoover’s tenure.

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Parallels Between Patel and J. Edgar Hoover

Politicization and Abuse of Power

Beverly Gage draws clear parallels between Patel’s rhetoric and Hoover's methods:

Michael Owinger [01:37]: “It's the sort of things that we have not seen an FBI director do since J. Edgar Hoover. Trump wants to politicize the FBI to turn it back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, where the FBI has its own really lawless agenda.”

Beverly Gage [01:53]: “We've got a recipe for severe abuse that could happen, the kind of abuse we haven't seen since J. Edgar Hoover illegally wiretapping and planting evidence against people he thought were a threat to him.”

Gage emphasizes that while Hoover abused his power extensively, Patel's approach could lead to even more severe politicization of the FBI.

Weaponization of the FBI

Gage elaborates on Hoover’s legacy of weaponizing the FBI under the guise of national security:

Beverly Gage [02:31]: “Hoover built the FBI, and Patel really wants to tear it down.”

She contrasts Hoover’s expansion of FBI powers with Patel's intentions to dismantle existing structures, suggesting a possible departure from Hoover’s methods towards more aggressive and politicized tactics.

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Hoover’s Legacy and Its Implications

Hoover’s Methods and Reforms

Gage provides a historical overview of Hoover’s tenure, highlighting his manipulation of the FBI for personal and political gains:

Beverly Gage [04:09]: “[The investigation into Martin Luther King Jr.]...finally it led to the FBI coming up with a threatening anonymous note that King took as a push for him to commit suicide...intended to push him out of public life.”

Hoover’s legacy is marred by extensive civil liberty abuses, leading to significant reforms post his death:

Beverly Gage [10:49]: “...the problem with what had been happening at the FBI was that Hoover had been too powerful, he had been too autonomous...we now have, at least in theory, a 10-year term for the FBI director.”

These reforms were designed to prevent the concentration of power that characterized Hoover’s leadership, ensuring greater transparency and accountability within the FBI.

Contrasting Leadership Styles

Gage contrasts Hoover’s nonpartisan stance with Patel’s overt political alignment:

Beverly Gage [08:09]: “Hoover...always made a point of describing himself as standing, 'unquote, outside of politics, being nonpartisan.'...he was willing to work with just about anyone who he thought would serve his interests.”

In contrast, Patel and his ally Dan Bongino appear to align closely with President Trump, suggesting a shift away from the FBI’s traditional nonpartisan role.

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Modern Implications: Patel’s Potential Impact

Threats to Agency Autonomy

Gage warns that Patel’s leadership could undermine the FBI’s autonomy:

Beverly Gage [07:43]: “So that seems to me to be a very powerful and pretty dangerous combination.”

Patel’s intentions to target political enemies and critics could lead to a highly politicized FBI, eroding public trust and democratic institutions.

Potential for Increased Abuse

The conversation highlights the dangers of unchecked power within the FBI:

Beverly Gage [16:15]: “...we have this powerful, secretive bureaucracy. And Patel and others have been quite open about saying that they want to use the power of an institution like the Bureau to go after Trump's enemies, to go after his critics.”

This scenario mirrors Hoover’s abuses but with possibly even less oversight and accountability, posing significant risks to civil liberties and democratic norms.

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Conclusion: Lessons from History

The discussion concludes with reflections on the importance of maintaining checks and balances within federal agencies:

Beverly Gage [15:20]: “...if we have a politicized bureau that's going after Trump's enemies, I think the very people who have voted for this set of changes might themselves pretty easily and pretty rapidly become the victims of what they wrought.”

Gage underscores the cyclical nature of power abuse and the necessity of safeguarding institutional integrity to prevent history from repeating itself.

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Notable Quotes:

• Beverly Gage [01:11]: “We’re gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

• Michael Owinger [01:37]: “It’s the sort of things that we have not seen an FBI director do since J. Edgar Hoover.”

• Beverly Gage [04:09]: “...the FBI coming up with a threatening anonymous note that King took as a push for him to commit suicide.”

• Beverly Gage [10:49]: “We now have, at least in theory, a 10-year term for the FBI director.”

• Beverly Gage [16:15]: “...we have this powerful, secretive bureaucracy. And Patel and others have been quite open about saying that they want to use the power of an institution like the Bureau to go after Trump's enemies, to go after his critics.”

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This episode of On the Media provides a thought-provoking analysis of the potential ramifications of Kash Patel’s leadership of the FBI, drawing critical lessons from the historical abuses of J. Edgar Hoover to underscore the importance of maintaining an autonomous and nonpartisan federal agency.

Transcript

[Beverly Gage]

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[Michael Owinger]

And now a word from our sponsors at Betterment when investing your money starts to feel like a second job, Betterment steps in with a little work life balance. They're the automated investing and savings app that handles your money so that you don't have to. It's diversified and optimized day after day, again and again, all while you focus on what matters most. Because your money doesn't need a work life balance, you do make your money hustle with Betterment. Get [e-mail] investing involves risk performance not guaranteed. You're listening to the on the Media midweek podcast. I'm Michael Owinger. Prior to becoming FBI Director, Cash Patel made no secret of his plans for the agency.

[Beverly Gage]

I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building and I'd take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals, go be cops. We're gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're gonna come after you whether it's criminally or civilly. We'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on.

[Michael Owinger]

Leading pundits and Democrats to warn of a return to darker days.

[Beverly Gage]

I think he's told us exactly what.

[Michael Owinger]

He'S going to do. It's the sort of things that we have not seen an FBI director do since J. Edgar Hoover. Trump wants to politicize the FBI to turn it back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, where the FBI has its own really lawless agenda.

[Beverly Gage]

We've got a recipe for severe abuse that could happen, the kind of abuse we haven't seen since J. Edgar Hoover illegally wiretapping and planting evidence against people he thought were a threat to him.

[Michael Owinger]

But according to Beverly Gage, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography G Man J Edgar Hoover in the Making of the American Century, some comparisons between these two offer more insights than others. For instance, the current FBI could be politicized in ways that even Hoover would have rejected.

[Beverly Gage]

Hoover built the FBI, and Patel really wants to tear it down.

[Michael Owinger]

I asked her to chart the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, who led the Bureau for 48 years, and explain how he came to weaponize the agency under the pretense of defending a, quote, American way of life.

[Beverly Gage]

For Hoover, in many ways, it meant defending the status quo and racial hierarchy. He was a very committed anti communist especially.

[Michael Owinger]

Communism in reality, is not a political problem.

[Beverly Gage]

It is a way of life, an.

[Michael Owinger]

Evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, a quarantine is.

[Beverly Gage]

Necessary to keep it from infecting this nation. He was a funny creature because he was a very powerful conservative ideologue on the one hand. And he was also a big believer in federal power in the administrative state. And these are things that we don't actually see going hand in hand, hand in our politics very often anymore.

[Michael Owinger]

Hoover's power expanded significantly when President Franklin D. Roosevelt put him in charge of the Bureau's nascent domestic intelligence system, which allowed the FBI to both hunt for spies and also basically spy on American citizens. It was through this authority that Hoover demonstrated a new way that the agency could be weaponized. You've pointed to the FBI's investigation into Martin Luther King, Jr. As a sort of case study in how quickly these practices could spiral out of control.

[Beverly Gage]

Today, the investigation of Martin Luther King was one of the most labor intensive and expensive investigations that the FBI undertook in the late 50s and early 60s. And it's a really interesting study in how something that's undertaken under a national security logic, if you will. The fight against communism became a powerful personal and political vendetta. So it began with an investigation into some members of the Communist party who were in King's orbit. It then extended into wiretaps, not only on those people, but on King himself. So the FBI began wiretapping his home and his office. From there, it extended into bugs that were planted in his hotel rooms. The FBI was recording King's extramarital sex life. And then it went into a much more aggressive, disruptive operation that entailed trying to share these recordings with people in Congress and in the press and get King exposed as what Hoover called him publicly, the most notorious liar in all of America. And then finally it led to the FBI coming up with a threatening anonymous note that King took as a push for him to commit suicide that the Bureau says was intended to push him out of public life.

[Michael Owinger]

The letter concludes by saying, quote, king, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

[Beverly Gage]

Nobody thought that King was breaking Any laws. He was not ever going to end up in a courtroom through this FBI investigation. This was all happening through these kind of secret techniques and was primarily because Hoover understood King as a threat to himself and to the Bureau and to the America that he wanted to see.

[Michael Owinger]

The press has predicted that Patel might use the Bureau to go after his and Trump's enemies. But you say that actually it's more likely that abuses of power will take the form of targeted surveillance operations, criminal law enforcement.

[Beverly Gage]

You know, you have to have some kind of crime, and then you've got a lot of people participating in the process. Juries, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the law itself. Certainly history is full of things like show trials, but I think it's actually much easier to engage in intimidation and disruption aimed at your political enemies through a whole host of other techniques, many of them secret, that are not going to be subject to that kind of scrutiny. Now, of course, it should be said the Bureau is not supposed to do those things, but if you wanted to and if you had control over the institution, that's probably the easier and less scrutinized way to go.

[Michael Owinger]

Hoover was often acting out of self interest and would work with both Democratic and Republican presidents, whereas Patel and Bongino really seem to be positioning themselves as loyalists to President Trump, acting to realize his vision for the Bureau, which we'll get to in a second. But with Hoover, tell me how he was able to manipulate presidents across the aisle.

[Beverly Gage]

One of the really fascinating parts of Hoover's career is simply that it went on for so long. He came into office in 1924, and he died on the job in 1972. So Hoover worked under four Democratic presidents, four Republican presidents, and he always made a point of describing himself as standing, quote, unquote, outside of politics, being nonpartisan. And I think in certain ways that was true. He was willing to work with just about anyone who he thought would serve his interests, serve the interests of the Bureau or who happened to be in power at that moment. He had very, very close relationship with both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. We think of these as being very different political characters, but Hoover did a great number of favors for each of them. You know, for Johnson, he was constantly supplying intelligence about the civil rights movement, other critics of the Johnson administration. For Nixon, he had had a long, long anti communist bond. They had been very close. When Nixon was vice president, many different.

[Michael Owinger]

Kinds of politicians were afraid of him. I mean, why can't a president get rid of somebody running the FBI if. If he wanted to?

[Beverly Gage]

Hoover had files on just about everyone who was anyone, not only in Washington, but in the United States more broadly. It's often said that he blackmailed people. Often it was a little more subtle than that, which is to say they might go to a senator, go to a congressman or a member of the press and say, well, Mr. Sen. We have found this terrible information about the affair that you're having, and we just want you to know that your secret is safe with us. So the senator knew that this information was there. People knew that Hoover was a pretty skilled leaker of information, and sometimes it was more direct than that as well.

[Michael Owinger]

After his death in 1972, the Senate's Church Committee investigated the Bureau along with the nsa, CIA and irs, uncovering a lot of civil liberty abuses and other secret intelligence operations. How did the government ultimately reckon with Hoover's legacy and how did we work towards preventing this kind of abuse of power from happening thereafter?

[Beverly Gage]

The analysis in that moment was that the problem with what had been happening at the FBI was that Hoover had been too powerful, he had been too autonomous, that the Bureau had been too insulated from democratic pressure, transparency, and that that was the problem. And so there were a number of reforms put in place that were intended to sort of split the difference between wanting the FBI to be this autonomous, independent, apolitical bureau, but at the same time wanting to make sure that it was more responsive, more transparent, and that no one was going to get the kind of power that J. Edgar Hoover had. So we now have, at least in theory, a 10 year term for the FBI director. And that term was put in place to prevent someone from doing what Hoover did, which was to be there for 48 years. But it was also put in place to make sure that the FBI still had some insulation from politics. Ten years was long longer than the term of any presidential administration, even if the President was re elected. And now I think what we're seeing with the Trump administration is that lots of those norms and policies and rules are just being thrown out the window.

[Michael Owinger]

Yeah, I mean, he appointed Christopher Wray to be director of the FBI and then did not allow him to serve the end of his 10 year term for one.

[Beverly Gage]

Right. And he appointed Christopher Wray after he fired James Comey. And so that was, if we all think back, a very big deal in 2017. That was really the first time that an FBI director had been fired in that way for what was clearly a concern about political loyalty. So this is quite consistent with what Trump did in his first term. But of course, this time, as so Often has happened. He's coming for his own appointee.

[Michael Owinger]

Yes. And appointing Cash Patel. And now Dan Bongino is kind of turning the whole thing up to 11. The narrative that we keep hearing is that, you know, the Bureau is this, like, toxically left wing agency. It's rife with anti Christian, anti conservative bias. What do you make of that?

[Beverly Gage]

Well, that seems like a very strange description of the FBI, which is a pretty conservative organization. The big claim that the FBI is full of closet Marxists does not make a whole lot of sense to me and certainly would have shocked and appalled J. Edgar Hoover.

[Michael Owinger]

Say a little bit more about Kash Patel's specific critique of the FBI.

[Beverly Gage]

There does seem to be a tension between, I'm coming in with the chainsaw, I'm going to shut down FBI headquarters and turn it into a museum of the deep state.

[Michael Owinger]

I love that.

[Beverly Gage]

Which is something that Patel said. And we'll see. I have to say, as a historian, I feel like, oh, I'd actually love to have a museum of the deep state, but maybe not in this way. And then there's also a really powerful desire to make use of this very large and powerful bureaucracy. But in some ways, the breaking of the FBI is also about breaking the norms and processes and constraints and internal culture. I also have wondered in this process about the Republicans in Congress who were so enthusiastic about confirming Patel as FBI director. Because I think one thing that we have learned about Donald Trump is that you might think that you're on the inside for a while, but at any moment, you too could be thrown out into the cold. And actually, if we have a politicized bureau that's going after Trump's enemies, I think the very people who have voted for this set of changes might themselves pretty easily and pretty rapidly become the victims of what they wrought.

[Michael Owinger]

Yeah, that's interesting because it sends a message to even Trump's current allies that, but they're on thin ice.

[Beverly Gage]

I also found it interesting that when Elon Musk demanded that federal workers send in these emails with the five points about what they did during the week, Cash Patel was actually one of the people who said to his employees, actually, don't do that, because, of course, we probably don't want it documented what every FBI agent in the country was doing in the last week.

[Michael Owinger]

Oh, that. That's an interesting interpretation. What I took away from it was Elon Musk, get your grimy hands out of my bureau.

[Beverly Gage]

Well, there's that, too. Right. So we have Kash Patel in that case, as allegedly the person who wants to tear down the Bureau, but also somehow being its protector or at least wanting his own fiefdom.

[Michael Owinger]

In some ways, we could look at J. Edgar Hoover's legacy as a kind of playbook for this new leadership. If they choose to wiretap political enemies, surveil them, Bully the press, etc. Are there signs that you're seeing that Patel and Bongino could go even further than Hoover?

[Beverly Gage]

I think Hoover had lots and lots of abuses, but then there were also certain constraints in the sense that there were moments where presidents or other figures wanted him to use the Bureau in explicitly political ways that he resisted because he thought it wasn't in his interest, it wasn't in the FBI's interest. And I don't see those sorts of constraints operating in this situation. I think what we are seeing potentially is a perfect storm in which you've got this powerful, secretive bureaucracy. And Patel and others have been quite open about saying that they want to use the power of an institution like the Bureau to go after Trump's enemies, to go after his critics. So that seems to me to be a very powerful and pretty dangerous combination.

[Michael Owinger]

Beverly, thank you very much.

[Beverly Gage]

Thanks so much.

[Michael Owinger]

Beverly Gage is the author of G Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. She wrote an article for the New Yorker titled How Would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?

[Beverly Gage]

I wouldn't like to be an A man or a B man or a.

[Michael Owinger]

C man or a D man or an E man or an F man get it? Gee But I'd like to be a G man and go bang bang bang bang I'd be afraid gang busting he man. Thanks for listening to this week's midweek podcast. Don't forget to tune into the big show this weekend to hear about the policy changes behind RFK JR's Make America Healthy Again rhetoric. In the meantime, you can keep up with the show on blue sky, Instagram, TikTok and our subreddit r onthemedia.

[Beverly Gage]

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