Kash Patel as F.B.I. Director Could ‘Destabilize the Whole System’

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Kash Patel as F.B.I. Director Could ‘Destabilize the Whole System’"

Podcast Information

• Title: The Opinions
• Host/Author: The New York Times Opinion
• Description: You've heard the news, here's what to make of it.
• Episode: Kash Patel as F.B.I. Director Could ‘Destabilize the Whole System’
• Release Date: January 31, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of The Opinions, Michelle Cottle, a political writer for The New York Times Opinion, engages in a deep discussion with journalist and author Garrett Graf about the controversial nomination of Kash Patel as the new Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Released on January 31, 2025, this episode delves into the implications of Patel's potential appointment and the broader impact on American institutions.

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Senate Confirmation Hearings and GOP Support

Initial Reactions to Hearings

Michelle Cottle opens the conversation by highlighting the Senate confirmation hearings held for Kash Patel. Garrett Graf notes the remarkable unity among Republican senators in supporting Patel, stating, “I think it seems clear that the Republican senators are circling wagons around Kash Patel, and it seemed like the Republican support behind him is strong and that I think he seems like he is coasting towards confirmation” (02:00).

Defensive Stance of GOP Senators

Cottle observes the protective behavior of Republican senators during the hearings, mentioning that figures like Chuck Grassley adopted a “scolding grandpa tone” to defend Patel (02:17). Graf adds that unlike other nominees who faced personal scrutiny, Patel’s institutional threat does not raise internal Republican concerns (04:05).

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Kash Patel: A Departure from Traditional FBI Leadership

Historical Context of FBI Leadership

Graf provides a historical perspective, contrasting Patel with previous FBI directors who have upheld the agency's integrity post-J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure. He explains, “Kash Patel represents a complete repudiation of the very specific model of FBI director that we have had in the 50 years since the death of J. Edgar Hoover” (04:27).

Patel's Qualifications and Alignment with Trump

The discussion highlights Patel’s close ties to President Donald Trump, describing him as “one of the ultimate MAGA loyalists” with a "thin resume" and no significant management background (05:53). Graf is particularly concerned about Patel’s loyalty to Trump, noting his active participation in Trump’s rallies and support for Trump merchandise, which undermines the traditionally apolitical stance expected of FBI directors.

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Potential Risks and Scenarios Under Patel’s Leadership

Resistance vs. Weaponization of the FBI

Graf outlines three potential scenarios for the FBI under Patel’s leadership:

1. Internal Resistance: The bureaucratic nature of the FBI might resist Patel’s attempts to overhaul the agency, potentially limiting his influence (07:30).
2. Weaponization: Alternatively, Patel could turn the FBI into a political tool, mirroring J. Edgar Hoover’s misuse, thereby posing a significant threat to democracy and national security (07:30).
3. Hybrid Outcome: A combination of limited resistance and partial weaponization, creating an unpredictable and unstable environment for the agency and the country (07:30).

Impact on National Security and Democratic Institutions

Graf emphasizes the critical role of the FBI in national security, highlighting that Patel’s vision to revert the FBI to a traditional policing role rather than a national security agency could jeopardize ongoing efforts against terrorism, cyber threats, and espionage (09:00). He warns that undermining the FBI’s current structure could lead to catastrophic failures similar to a “another 9/11” (07:30).

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Erosion of Institutional Trust and Oversight Challenges

Undermining Public Faith in Institutions

Cottle connects Patel’s nomination to a broader trend of diminishing public trust in institutions. She posits that undermining the FBI’s independence erodes the entire system’s functionality, making it difficult to hold officials accountable and weakening democratic checks and balances (10:17).

Challenges in Oversight

Graf discusses the difficulties in maintaining oversight once Patel assumes his role. He explains that “the oversight of the FBI largely falls to the courts and the Justice Department,” but emphasizes that appointing “irresponsible people into positions of responsibility” severely hampers effective oversight (12:25). Graf argues that Patel’s appointment is part of a larger pattern in the Trump administration of placing highly partisan and inexperienced individuals in key roles, thereby destabilizing institutional integrity (13:02).

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Potential Consequences of Patel’s FBI Leadership

Repercussions for Individuals

Graf elaborates on the tangible impacts Patel could have on individuals, noting that the FBI has the power to ruin lives through prolonged investigations and legal battles. He warns that Patel could exploit these mechanisms to target political enemies, leading to financial ruin and personal embarrassment without necessarily bringing criminal charges against them (13:59).

Operational Damage and Institutional Decay

The discussion further explores how Patel’s lack of operational experience could exacerbate the FBI’s vulnerabilities. By taking over a position with substantial operational responsibilities, Patel could swiftly cause significant disruptions, making it difficult to safeguard national security effectively (15:43).

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Long-Term Concerns and Institutional Complacency

Mid-Air Collision Incident as a Symbol

Graf expresses his deepest concerns by referencing a recent mid-air collision incident in Washington, D.C., which he sees as emblematic of the potential collapse of effective governance. He fears that the administration’s assault on institutions like the FBI could lead to broader failures in essential services, such as clean water, air travel safety, and counterterrorism efforts (15:52).

Four-Year Test of National Complacency

Cottle frames this situation as a “four-year test” of American complacency, suggesting that the nation may become increasingly indifferent to the erosion of foundational protections and governmental support systems (17:26).

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Conclusion

Michelle Cottle and Garrett Graf conclude the episode by underscoring the severity of Kash Patel’s potential appointment as FBI Director. They highlight the profound risks to national security, democratic institutions, and individual rights. The discussion serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of maintaining institutional integrity and the dangers posed by highly partisan and inexperienced leadership within critical government agencies.

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Notable Quotes

• Garrett Graf: “I think it seems clear that the Republican senators are circling wagons around Kash Patel... he seems like he is coasting towards confirmation.” (02:00)
• Garrett Graf: “Kash Patel represents a complete repudiation of the very specific model of FBI director that we have had in the 50 years since the death of J. Edgar Hoover.” (04:27)
• Garrett Graf: “Patel wants the FBI to sort of go back to being cops... undoing that comes at a pretty steep cost.” (07:30)
• Garrett Graf: “Kash Patel is so uniquely dangerous as FBI director... this is such a tactical and operational role.” (13:59)
• Garrett Graf: “The average American shouldn't actually have to care about who the FBI director is... Trump’s assault on these institutions undermines those basic protections.” (15:52)

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Timestamps:

• Initial Discussion: [00:47] to [01:22]
• Hearings Reactions: [01:44] to [04:05]
• Historical Context: [04:27] to [07:18]
• Potential Scenarios: [07:30] to [10:17]
• Institutional Trust: [10:17] to [12:59]
• Individual Impact: [13:02] to [15:43]
• Long-Term Concerns: [15:52] to [17:31]

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This episode of The Opinions provides a comprehensive analysis of the implications surrounding Kash Patel’s nomination for FBI Director, emphasizing the potential threats to the integrity of American institutions and national security.

Transcript

[Michelle Cottle]

The New York Times app has all.

[Garrett Graf]

This stuff that you may not have seen.

[Podcast Host]

The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections.

[Garrett Graf]

I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling, click wordle or Connections, and then swipe over to read today's headlines. There's an article next to a recipe next to games, and it's just easy to get everything in one place. This app is essential. The New York Times app, all of.

[Podcast Host]

The times all in one place.

[Garrett Graf]

Download it [e-mail] Apple this is the.

[Podcast Host]

Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

[Michelle Cottle]

I'm Michelle Cottle. I'm a political writer for New York Times Opinion and a co host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. And today, I'm delighted to be joined by journalist and author Garrett Graf to talk about President Trump's choice to head the FBI. CA Patel, who just had his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.

[Kash Patel]

If an FBI director promoted a song of people who sprayed pepper spray in the face of an FBI agent, would you say they were fit to be director? Yes or no? Would they be fit to be director?

[Michelle Cottle]

I am fit to be the director of the FBI. Despite the long and spicy proceedings, Patel is widely expected to be confirmed. But Garrett has observed, quote, of all the Trump nominees, Patel ranks among the most dangerous. Okay, that's ominous. Garrett, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Garrett Graf]

It's my pleasure to talk to you anytime.

[Michelle Cottle]

I want to get us started just with what your initial reaction to the hearings were. So just give me your Reader's Digest condensed version or.

[Garrett Graf]

I think it seems clear that the Republican senators are circling wagons around Cash Patel, and it seemed like the Republican support behind him is strong and that I think he seems like he is coasting towards confirmation.

[Michelle Cottle]

I was struck by how much it felt like those were his defense lawyers there boosting him along. I mean, Chuck Grassley, the chairman, put on his best kind of scolding grandpa tone.

[Garrett Graf]

I expect Mr. Patel to be treated fairly by my colleagues who are here today to consider the nomination.

[Michelle Cottle]

And they did, as you say, circle the wagons. But I also, like you, went into this thinking he would almost have had to have jumped up and stabbed a Republican during the hearing for this to kind of derail his nomination. There's just, he is the kind of central disruptive figure that Trump is looking to, to overhaul the deep state, it looks like. And I just, I can't foresee Or I couldn't foresee what was going to stop this.

[Garrett Graf]

Yeah. I think also one of the things that we have seen that has united the nominees that are wavering or have been withdrawn, like in the case of President Trump's first Attorney General pick, Matt Gaetz, is that they are sort of personally odious. We saw Pete Hegseth really struggle with personal allegations about behavior. We've seen Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr really struggle in confirmation hearings because of their personal views or associations. And in Kash Patel's case, I think he is institutionally worrisome, but doesn't appear to have the sort of troubling personal background that at least bothers the Republicans.

[Michelle Cottle]

Even beyond the hearing, which, you know, it's a lot theater in these situations. You know an awful lot about the Bureau. You've been reporting on the FBI for 15 years. You've written multiple books. You know this agency. Why is Patel such an unusual choice?

[Garrett Graf]

Yeah. To me, what is so uniquely dangerous about Kash Patel as FBI director is, is that he represents a complete repudiation of the very specific model of FBI director that we have had in the 50 years since the death of J. Edgar Hoover. That at the end of Hoover's then 50 year reign at the FBI, the FBI had been really perfected by Hoover as a political weapon. You know, FBI officials sent, you know, blackmail tapes and a note encouraging suicide to Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. They used it to out and punish homosexuals in Washington politics. And that as Hoover's full reign of terror became CLEAR in the 1970s, Congress, the Justice Department, the executive branch, the courts put in all sorts of new guardrails and protections and oversight capabilities to ensure that the FBI could never be used like that again.

[Michelle Cottle]

That's why they have the 10 year appointments.

[Garrett Graf]

Right, exactly. That FBI directors have been appointed by presidents for a 10 year term, which is very specifically meant to be so that they are removed from day to day politics. Kash Patel comes from a incredibly different place. He is one of the ultimate MAGA loyalists. He has an incredibly thin resume. He's younger by a decade than any previous recent FBI director and he has no management background. And Kash Patel very notably has been appointed sort of particularly because he is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump. He, you know, hawks merchandise featuring Donald Trump. He was a Trump staffer. He has appeared at Trump political rallies as a speaker, which is just a completely unthinkable black mark for any previous FBI nominee. And that he is being appointed with an explicit mission, seemingly from the president to weaponize the FBI in exactly the way that Hoover used to weaponize it.

[Michelle Cottle]

Now, you've done a lot of thinking about where this all could go. Earlier this week, you published a newsletter laying out three possible ways in broad strokes. Do you want to walk us through some of those?

[Garrett Graf]

Yeah. We don't really know, obviously, how this will unfold, but what I can imagine happening are a couple of different things. The FBI is an enormously bureaucratic organization. You know, agents joke that bureaucracy is literally its middle name. And so I think that there is one scenario where the building is able to resist some of Kash Patel's worst impulses. You know, he is remarkably inexperienced, and that could work against him as he tries to both, quote, unquote, reform the bureau and also make it do his bidding and President Trump's bidding. There's another scenario, of course, where Kash Patel succeeds and returns the FBI to the dark ages as a political weapon, as a secret police for the president. And it is also an agency that very uniquely reveres the role of director and takes orders from the director seriously as they roll down through that big bureaucracy. Both of these scenarios, though, I think, come with some meaningful risk to the American people, both in terms of our national security as well as our democracy. And I think Kash Patel's vision for what the FBI does is particularly dangerous because he has been very clear that he wants the FBI to sort of go back to being cops. But much of its work, particularly post 9 11, has been in the national security realm. Patel sees those national security, the counterintelligence cases, the espionage cases, the counterterrorism cases that it does as being, you know, part and parcel of this sort of deep state surveillance state that he thinks is where the deep state lives in the FBI. Getting rid of that, undoing that, cutting that back, is a recipe for another 9 11. The FBI has done an enormous amount of work very carefully and very thoughtfully to build relationships and cooperation and intelligence sharing with the CIA and the NSA and other intelligence agencies to combat cyber threats, to combat intelligence threats, to combat counterterrorism threats. And undoing that comes at a pretty steep cost.

[Michelle Cottle]

All of this, to me, then, seems to feed into the larger danger that we've seen with President Trump, which is when you start undermining the public faith in institutions, then those institutions can't really function like they're supposed to. I mean, you don't have people who are willing to share information. You don't have the ability to hold government officials accountable when they've done things that are wrong, because you just claim that the FBI is itself corrupt, and so you continue to destabilize the whole system. I mean, do you. Do you see this going forward, even now that he's back in charge? I mean, I can see him doing it under a Biden administration, but it seems like this could be where we're headed, even under his administration.

[Garrett Graf]

Yeah. And I think, to me, there's this sort of overarching shame, I think, in a lot of Trump's appointments is that with these people that he is putting forward for jobs like Attorney General, Director of National Intelligence, FBI director, it sort of forces you to defend institutions that are actually really in need of reform. Part of the challenge of this is, boy, America could really use a great, thoughtful, nuanced discussion about the FBI surveillance authorities and oversight structure a quarter century after 9 11. Cash Patel is clearly not the person who should be leading that. Nor is Kash Patel coming in with a particularly nuanced and thoughtful vision for how to improve the oversight structures of the Office of General Counsel. He's coming in with a very explicit one that he returned to in his confirmation hearings of saying, basically, I want to close headquarters entirely on day one.

[Michelle Cottle]

But what about oversight down the road? I mean, theoretically, is there anything that can be done once Patel is in place in terms of just oversight of the department or.

[Garrett Graf]

Yeah, I mean, once you get into the role, the oversight of the FBI largely falls to the courts and to the Justice Department. And I think, to me, the challenge, and this is the challenge that we see across so much of the Trump administration is the primary check and balance in US Government, in US Democracy, turns out to be not putting irresponsible people into positions of responsibility.

[Michelle Cottle]

Oh, that's so unfortunate.

[Garrett Graf]

It is. And like, that's the, you know, like, putting someone in charge of the FBI who actually cares about the FBI's independence and cares about their own personal integrity. And right now, we have a lineup of the least qualified, least experienced, most partisan, and politically loyal nominees we have ever seen for any of these roles.

[Michelle Cottle]

So taking this down to a more personal level, during his hearing, Patel disavowed that list of enemies that he published in the book Government Gangsters. He assured everyone during the hearing, it's not an enemy's list. It's a total mischaracterization. But let's just say, for argument's sake, he did want to go after some of these folks for retribution. What could he do? What would be one of the more likely scenarios?

[Garrett Graf]

So I think part of this is understanding that the FBI can ruin lives without bringing criminal charges. You know, the FBI can drag you along for a couple of years in an investigation that requires you to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on legal bills and never goes anywhere but, you know, destroys your financial security. Success for Kash Patel in a persecution of a political enemy might be just the visuals of the FBI agents raiding a home or an office and, you know, carrying boxes of documents out to sort of personally embarrass and smear people. I think to me, the reason that Kash Patel is so uniquely dangerous as FBI director is because this is such a tactical and operational role. I mean, there are so many places where Donald Trump is installing dangerously inexperienced people in cabinet roles or agency heads that just frankly don't do that much operationally day to day. And so, you know, are somewhat insulated in the actual damage that they can wreak on individual targeted lives. And this is a situation where Kash Patel would be taking over the reins of a position where he can make life incredibly uncomfortable for individual people very quickly.

[Michelle Cottle]

Wow. Okay, so that's certainly upbeat. Before I let you go here, what is it that is most keeping you up at night with the situation right now?

[Garrett Graf]

Well, I think to me the challenge, it actually has to do with the mid air collision that we saw in D.C. because to me, I think that that incident crystallizes one of my biggest fears about the Trump era that we are entering, which is government works until it doesn't, and that we forget just how hard it is to actually make government work on a day to day basis. And the average American shouldn't actually have to care about who the FBI director is. The fact that this week we are paying attention to who the Inspector general of the Department of Agriculture is, is a problem. And to me, what I really worry about is how complacent we are as a country, about the backdrop of support that the federal government gives to our lives in a thousand different ways in a daily basis that we have never thought about in living history. And that Donald Trump's assault on these institutions undermines those basic protections. Clean water, clean air, safe air travel, an FBI that protects us against terrorism.

[Michelle Cottle]

We're going to have a four year test of that complacency is what you're telling me.

[Garrett Graf]

Yes.

[Michelle Cottle]

Okay, well, now I'm going to be up at 9. I want to just thank you for that, but no, I really appreciate this. This has been fantastic.

[Garrett Graf]

Well, Michelle, it is always a pleasure to talk to you, even about the darkest of subjects.

[Podcast Host]

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