Ice hockey is the only professional sport in which athletes routinely stop play to punch each other in the face. Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has always loved hockey. He still plays on a beer league team in DC. Unlike any prior nominee for the position, Patel is a harsh critic of the Bureau. In his book Government Gangsters: the Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy, he has called for “a new Church Committee,” referring to the 1975 congressional hearings overseen by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat. The Church Committee exposed, among other things, the FBI’s illegal campaign of surveillance and harassment against political and civil-rights leaders, and the CIA’s Project MKUltra, in which Americans were unwittingly experimented on with LSD.
Not too long ago it was almost exclusively the radical left that made the sorts of criticisms of the FBI and CIA made by Patel, and that remembered the abuses uncovered by the Church Committee. But these days, many leftists in good standing scoff at the very idea of a “deep state” with the intelligence agencies at its heart.
The term “deep state” was imported from left-wing Turkish political discourse into English by the former Canadian diplomat and UC Berkeley professor emeritus, Peter Dale Scott. Since his initial deployment of the term in English, Scott has developed the idea of the deep state into the broader and more nuanced idea of “deep politics,” in which elite networks battle for power and control by means legal and illegal, open and secret.
Although it is unclear whether Patel is familiar with Scott, his conception of the deep state is similar. He describes “the politicization of core American institutions and the federal governmental apparatus by a significant number of high-level cultural leaders and officials” who act through “networks of networks.” Just as important as Patel’s critiques are his proposed reforms. He wants to move the FBI out of Washington, DC, to restructure the FISA court and special counsels, and to fire and prosecute the top ranks of many agencies. He includes in his book a four-page list of names of those he thinks are corrupt.
A child of working-class immigrants, he became a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department and senior counsel on counterterrorism for the House Select Committee on Intelligence, before ending up as principal deputy to Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. But the most significant fact about him may be that he started his career as a public defender.
In many ways, Patel’s fealty to Donald Trump is like that of a criminal defense attorney to a client. Right or wrong, no matter how wild the accusations, the defense attorney’s job is to strike back against the prosecution and continually reassert that the burden of proof lies with the accuser, not the accused, and that the accuser must follow the legal rules no matter how confining that may be.
“The most significant fact about him may be that he started his career as a public defender.”
Patel was first attracted to the defense attorney’s sensibility as a teenager. Working weekends at the Garden City Country Club, he regularly caddied for a group of hard-charging New York City defense attorneys who regaled each other (and their young caddy) with wild stories about their clients, the prosecutors they faced off against, and their own dramatic courtroom victories and defeats. Something about these men made Patel want to be a defense lawyer. After law school, he spent the next eight years in the Miami-Dade County, Fla. public defenders’ office, widely considered one of the best in the country.
Patel, who was raised in an apolitical environment and moved rightward in college, describes his colleagues in Miami as the kind of people who “usually see criminals as the true victims and American society as the real bad actor.” He dismisses this as reflective of a leftwing outlook, but Patel got along with these people well enough to work with them for eight years, and it is possible to see some parallels between their viewpoint and his critique of the deep state. In Patel’s telling, he was motivated above all by his belief in due process. Even if Patel’s clients were guilty, the rules of the game mattered. His job as a defense attorney was to keep the government honest, to force it to follow the rules and prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Patel’s hostility toward the deep state seems to have begun when he was doing counterterrorism prosecutions at the Department of Justice and was assigned to the team that built the cases against the Benghazi attackers. The story at Benghazi is that through simple neglect the State Department failed to provide sufficient security for the US Ambassador to Libya and his team. On the night of Sept. 11, 2012, Ambassador John Christopher Stevens and three of his staff were killed by gunmen who overran and burned down the compound.
Both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took responsibility for their failures. But Patel faults Attorney General Eric Holder for dropping the cases against all the alleged attackers save one. In his view, FBI and DOJ leadership decided not to prosecute most of the suspected attackers because the Obama administration didn’t want further coverage of the Benghazi debacle to mar the president’s re-election chances. To be fair to Holder, though, most of these would-be defendants were never in US custody, a fact that Patel omits from his book.
Patel’s disdain for the DOJ and FBI deepened further when he became an investigator for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. There Patel’s research produced the Nunes Memo (named for California Rep. Devin Nunes and released to the public in 2018), which alleged that charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election traced back to a single flimsy source, the so-called Steele Dossier. Named for Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer turned opposition-research specialist, this file was full of unverified accusations against Trump. It had been produced at the behest of, and partially paid for by, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
According to Patel, the FBI quickly realized that the Steele Dossier was unreliable yet hid that fact from the public. It proceeded to launder accusations derived from it through the press and the DC rumor mill, and then treated the resulting rumors as if they were real intelligence.
Patel also faults the FBI for its handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Thanks to Miranda Devine’s reporting, the Twitter Files, and testimony in Hunter Biden’s gun trial, we now know that the FBI authenticated the laptop using Hunter Biden’s iCloud storage account; but then, starting in early 2020, held more than 30 meetings with crucial players in Big Tech to “prebunk” as “Russian disinformation” any allegations that Hunter Biden was trading influence and access to his father for huge sums of money in Ukraine, Central Asia, and China.
In other words, the FBI spent most of a year preparing social-media companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story if and when it surfaced. They dutifully did so when The New York Post first reported on it. A week later, 51 former intelligence officials (with the knowledge and thus tacit approval of CIA Director Gina Haspel) published a letter describing the laptop story as likely Russian disinformation. Only in March 2022, a year and a half after the story broke, would The New York Times and The Washington Post finally admit that the Hunter Biden laptop was real.
Patel’s ire at the FBI and DOJ was fed by the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents. As early as May 2021, Trump had been in conversation with federal officials from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) about documents he had retained. By most accounts Trump’s file boxes were chaotic, with classified and non-classified documents mixed together.
“Trump was making an effort to cooperate.”
In January 2022 he sent 15 boxes of documents to NARA, saying that “It was a great honor to work with” the National Archives “to help formally preserve the Trump Legacy.” Nevertheless NARA referred the matter to the Justice Department, and in March the FBI opened an investigation. In early June of the same year, Trump found and sent another batch of classified documents to the DOJ. A day later, FBI agents visited Mar-a-lago to meet one of Trump’s attorneys and receive 38 more classified documents. In other words, Trump was making an effort to cooperate.
Nonetheless, in August Attorney General Merrick Garland personally approved the warrant request that sent the FBI on its media-stunt raid of Trump’s private living quarters, including a search of Melania’s closets. Almost a year after the raid, Trump was charged with 37 federal felonies.
For Patel, the Mar-a-Lago raid was, like everything that came before it, part of an ongoing campaign to undermine Trump’s chances of re-election. Keep in mind that at the same time, President Biden also had poorly stored classified documents in his Delaware garage; he faced no raid and no federal criminal charges.
What does Kash Patel propose to do about the rogue agency Trump has nominated him to lead? He wants the Bureau’s authority “dramatically limited and refocused.” Most strikingly, he wants to move it out of Washington, DC. Although he is vague on details, Patel suggests most DC-based FBI staff can be sent to existing field offices, and that the top leadership might need to operate by traveling a circuit of regional offices. The idea may sound far-fetched. But politics are shaped by place. To geographically redistribute and restructure the FBI would have significant impacts. An FBI located at the center of DC influence-peddling is necessarily different from one that is scattered across America and tasked with fighting interstate fraud and white-collar crime.
Patel also wants to overhaul so-called special counsels, which are appointed to overcome conflicts of interest within the Department of Justice. In Patel’s view, special counsels rarely have real autonomy because they are too mired in Washington power networks and institutions. Patel cites the example of Robert Mueller reporting to then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who set the parameters of Mueller’s probe even though Rosenstein himself played a part in the origins of Russiagate. Patel sees no perfect solution, “but one reform would be to remove special counsels from DC altogether and to mandate that special counsels are no longer allowed to use DC grand juries.” Furthermore Patel thinks only lower-ranking, politically unconnected DOJ attorneys should act as special counsels; and that the scope of these investigations “must be specifically limited to a single purpose.” In short, no more roving witch hunts against political opponents.
Patel is not always radical. He has criticisms of the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court that, by most accounts, has declined no more than a handful of warrant requests in its entire nearly 50-year history. However, unlike many FISA critics, he sees this secret court as essential to American national security. He proposes to reform it by introducing some due-process requirements, including written transcripts of its deliberations and a stable of defense attorneys to attack every warrant request.
At times while reading Patel’s recommendations I had an odd feeling of déjà vu. Where had I heard this before? I realized it was in State and Revolution, the book in which Vladimir Lenin declares, “The proletariat cannot simply win state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into new hands, but must smash this apparatus, must break it and replace it by a new one.”
At times Lenin portrays the state not as tool of class rule but as a relatively autonomous “‘parasite’ on the body of bourgeois society.” For Lenin, state bureaucracies must be smashed because bureaucrats are “privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.”
Obviously, Patel and Lenin are worlds apart. But they share an understanding of the nature of state power. In their view, form and function are intimately bound together. Patel knows he can’t simply lay hold of the “ready-made state machinery” and expect to steer in a new direction. The state is not an inanimate object. Rather, it is a collection of people, a social ecology, a “network of networks” with written and unwritten rules, layers of interest and, yes, a swampy geography.
Patel is not a leftist, but he wants to radically reform agencies that have long oppressed the US left. Given the Bureau’s sordid history of targeting trade unions, peace activists, campus radicals, and black politicians (they just entrapped Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the left-wing mayor of Jackson, Miss.), the left should support pruning FBI power. Nor is there any likelihood of an AOC-led “new Church Committee” on the horizon any time soon.
“Sadly, the left will not support Patel.”
Sadly, the left will not support Patel. The vast majority of leftists don’t know the first thing about how the FBI suppressed the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop so as to tilt the 2020 election in Biden’s favor, and don’t want to learn. Patel could be the most radical FBI director in history, one whose reforms, intentionally or not, respond to decades of left-wing critiques of the Bureau’s abuses. But the left will almost certainly attack Patel as a fascist, ignore any detailed discussion of his plans, and thus, in effect, defend the FBI.
As confirmation hearings approach, Patel is like that hockey player who has just dropped his stick, taken off his gloves, and is circling back toward that dirty, repeat-fouling opponent. What comes next is a hockey fight.