Kash Patel vs. J. Edgar Hoover

Since President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention of appointing his political loyalist Kash Patel as the director of the F.B.I., critics have warned that we’re heading back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. should be so lucky.

Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan independence. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he grew up imbued with the idea that career-long government service was one of life’s noblest aspirations. As a D.C. resident, Hoover could not vote, and though he was a staunch conservative, he never joined a political party. Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the F.B.I. as a partisan force to protect Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. If such naked politicization happens to undermine public faith in the F.B.I., so much the better. In Patel’s book “Government Gangsters,” published last year, he describes the Bureau’s top officials—along with other “Deep State” executives—as a group of “spiteful mandarins” hell-bent on destroying the country in service of their “uniformly left wing” desires. He warns, “Democrats and the Deep State are on the same team.”

The idea that people who work at the F.B.I. are closet leftists conspiring to bring down the Republic has to be one of the more bizarre takes in a political moment with no shortage of them. But such is the state of our politics, in which self-proclaimed protectors of “law and order” attack the national-security establishment, while reluctant liberals defend its professionalism and autonomy. Hoover would agree with Patel that what happens at the F.B.I. matters. However, the similarities mostly end there. Hoover used to describe the Bureau as the “one bulwark” against a hidden left-wing conspiracy that penetrated all corners of American life. In Patel’s world, the F.B.I. is the conspiracy.

Hoover became the director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation exactly a century ago, under Harlan Fiske Stone, who was then the Attorney General. Stone wanted to clean up a division of the department that had become infamous for spying on dissidents and deploying its agents as political enforcers for the corrupt Harding Administration. Hoover had started at the Justice Department right out of law school. He rose quickly, was promoted to head the department’s new Radical Division in 1919, at the age of twenty-four, then given the position of assistant director of the Bureau at twenty-six. Though Hoover was tainted by the department’s controversies, Stone believed that he was a reformer at heart. The appointment process was simple at the time; the Attorney General, not the President, chose the director, without any need for Senate confirmation. Nobody at the time imagined that the Bureau, staffed with just a few hundred ill-trained agents, would grow into a federal colossus—or that Hoover would want to stay in the job for the next forty-eight years.

On the surface, Patel shares some of that reformist energy. The son of Indian immigrants, he grew up in a household of “dispositional conservatism,” as he put it in “Government Gangsters,” with parents who believed in hard work and the American Dream. He became a lawyer more or less on a whim, after caddying for a group of defense lawyers at a Long Island golf course. With no lucrative offers from white-shoe firms, he went to work for the government—first as a public defender, then as a prosecutor in the D.O.J.’s national-security division. After Trump’s election, he took a job as an aide to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Devin Nunes (now the C.E.O. of Trump Media). That position and others he held in the Trump Administration gave Patel a front-row seat at what he describes as the “extended shitstorm” of the Administration’s tangles with the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. His book name-checks just about every far-right grievance of the era: Benghazi, the Steele dossier, the Russia investigation, “men” in “girls’ bathrooms,” Hunter Biden’s laptop, January 6th, and critical race theory. What it all amounted to, in Patel’s view, was a need to contain, reform, and discipline the Bureau and the other intelligence agencies. As he wrote in his book, nothing less than “the survival of the American Republic is at stake.”

Hoover spent his first decade as director focussed on internal reforms: firing patronage appointees, writing up a policy manual, and refining the Bureau’s hub-and-spoke system, with headquarters in Washington and field offices across the country. At Stone’s behest, he curtailed the most controversial forms of investigation, including the surveillance of elected officials, and promoted the Bureau’s nonpartisan reputation. To fill out his agent corps, he hired a new generation of college-educated lawyers and accountants, chosen for their professional bona fides but also for their ability to conform to Hoover’s preferred agent type: tall, trim, white, and male. He envisioned the Bureau as both a model and a helpmeet for local law enforcement, able to perform high-level scientific and analytical work beyond the capacities of local cops. He also established many of the programs that still define the F.B.I. in our cultural imagination, such as its cutting-edge forensics lab and its academy at Quantico.

Hoover emphasized internal reform partly because he didn’t have much else to do. At the time, federal law gave the Bureau a strange grab bag of investigative duties, ranging from interstate prostitution to antitrust violations. Its jurisdiction expanded in the mid-nineteen-thirties, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, when it got a new name: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Roosevelt was worried about crime; specifically, the wave of kidnappings and bank robberies that rocked Depression-era America. So he announced a war on crime, and backed new laws expanding the Bureau’s powers. Hoover made the most of that opportunity, creating a publicity unit to tout the F.B.I.’s crime-fighting triumphs.

A few years later, with an actual war on the horizon, Roosevelt turned to the Bureau again, putting Hoover in charge of the country’s nascent domestic-intelligence system, which included hunting spies and saboteurs as well as monitoring the political opinions and activities of American citizens. Thus was born the hybrid architecture of today’s F.B.I.: part law-enforcement agency, part domestic-intelligence agency, with a single powerful director at the top.

Since the announcement of Patel’s nomination, most concern has centered on the idea that, under his leadership, the F.B.I. would launch criminal investigations of Trump’s political opponents and media critics. That may well happen, producing a chill on speech and a major headache for everyone involved. But the worst abuses of F.B.I. power have usually come through its intelligence and surveillance operations. Making a criminal case in court is hard; there are laws and procedures and evidentiary standards. Intelligence investigations operate in a more nebulous realm. If Hoover had never moved into intelligence work, we might remember him as the scourge of John Dillinger and not much else. Instead, he became the chief of the nation’s political police, with an enormous secret bureaucracy at his disposal.

Hoover’s earliest targets, in the run-up to the Second World War, were alleged Nazis and communists. With the end of the war, the Nazis faded, but the communists remained. In public, Hoover still claimed to be the great avatar of the administrative state, devoted to law and professionalism and restraint. Behind the scenes, though, he defined his national-security authority in the broadest possible terms. The F.B.I. was defending an “American way of life,” as he conceived it, so almost anyone who sought, as he saw it, to upend the status quo became a legitimate intelligence target. Alongside the surveillance of dissidents, Hoover built up files on politicians, members of the press, and celebrities who criticized the F.B.I. or otherwise disagreed with him. His agents deployed bugs, wiretaps, informants, and disruptive operations on a scale unprecedented in the United States, but most of it was never revealed during Hoover’s lifetime. He maintained tight control over the Bureau’s files. When he chose to share details of operations—with Congress, the Attorney General, the White House, or anyone else—it was because the disclosure served his own purposes. During his tenure, there was no effective Freedom of Information Act, no FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court, no congressional committee with the right (or the courage) to demand information from the Bureau.

The F.B.I.’s investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr., provides a case study in how quickly such practices could spiral out of control. The inquiry began with a narrow claim that King’s inner circle included men with ties to the Communist Party. Within a few years, the Bureau was bugging King’s hotel rooms, recording his sexual encounters, and using what it found to threaten King and attempt to discredit him in the press. But at no time did anyone think, or even suggest, that King had committed any sort of serious crime.

The King investigation stands out for its sheer outrageousness, but a similar defense of the status quo drove the F.B.I.’s investigations of the Black Panthers, the antiwar movement, and the New Left. It also led the Bureau to conduct disruptive operations against the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups, who were thought to threaten the social order from the right. Hoover styled himself the great defender of the Washington consensus, and the last best hope of a republic under siege. To resist the F.B.I.—or to criticize Hoover—was to attack America itself.

Trump shares Hoover’s toxic blend of megalomania and political ruthlessness. So does Patel, who has published a children’s-book series lauding a Trump look-alike as “King Donald.” But Hoover was never partisan in the ways that Trump and Patel are. He did not much care who won elections, as long as the winner promised to support the F.B.I. He ended up serving under four Republican and four Democratic Presidents, along with a rotating cast of Attorneys General. He often performed political operations for those Presidents, but he was mostly an equal-opportunity offender. The F.B.I. spied on civil-rights protesters at the 1964 Democratic National Convention at Lyndon Johnson’s request. But Hoover also wiretapped White House staffers and members of the press as a personal favor to Richard Nixon.

No President dared to fire Hoover; he died, still on the job, in 1972, near the end of Nixon’s first term. At that point, the chief critique of the F.B.I. was that Hoover had amassed far too much power, with almost no accountability. Laws passed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies dictated that the director was to be appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and limited to a ten-year term. After Hoover’s death, the Senate’s Church Committee conducted sweeping hearings into the civil-liberties abuses and covert activities of federal intelligence agencies, precipitating another wave of reform. Many of the accountability mechanisms that still govern intelligence operations came out of that era, including the FISA court, the congressional intelligence committees, and an expanded Freedom of Information Act.

Patel, in his demand for immediate reform of the deep state, can sound a bit like a nineteen-seventies civil libertarian. In “Government Gangsters,” he writes, “Our goal is not to destroy federal law enforcement.” Rather, he insists, “it’s to stop federal law enforcement powers from being abused for corrupt ends.” He wants public defenders at secret FISA-court proceedings to protect intelligence targets from the whims of federal officials. He thinks that we need to shrink the agencies and to increase transparency. He also believes that too many government documents are being classified, often for the wrong reasons. (Patel is not, in fact, the most extreme critic among Trump’s nominees. As a Republican primary candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy—slated to be a co-head, with Elon Musk, of the Department of Government Efficiency—recommended that the Bureau be abolished.)

The impetus behind these urgent calls is, of course, not merely an abstract concern over the proper balance between liberty and security; it’s the fact that the F.B.I. investigated Trump. In Trumpworld’s narrative, the Russia investigation, the prosecution of January 6th participants, and the hunt for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago all constitute an abuse of power. The attacks on the F.B.I. also fit nicely with Trump’s self-declared war on the administrative state. In earlier generations, conservatives and Republicans were often at pains to explain which parts of the federal government they liked (the military and the intelligence agencies) and which parts were tyrannical (mostly, the social-welfare agencies). Now the anti-state critique includes all branches of the federal bureaucracy, from the Department of Education to the U.S. Army.

Since the F.B.I. is nonetheless likely to survive, Patel has not been entirely absolved of making distinctions about which parts should stay and which should go. His big idea is to shut down the Bureau’s D.C. headquarters—currently the J. Edgar Hoover Building—and send the personnel out to the field offices. The building, which was opened after Hoover’s death, is already slated for obsolescence; the F.B.I. intends to construct a new headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland. During the campaign, Trump called for the headquarters to remain in D.C., instead, as part of a “plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city.” Patel, though, is advocating a more far-flung location—or, perhaps, for no fixed headquarters. He has suggested turning the old building into a Museum of the Deep State (an idea that, as a historian, I could theoretically get behind, though I suspect we’d have different visions). His claim is that the rot comes from the top, while the agents out there working hard and fighting crime are still American heroes. “You’re cops,” he declared on a recent podcast. “Go be cops.” As political messaging, it’s a crafty way to maintain “law and order” righteousness while railing against the Washington élites.

Can he pull it off? The F.B.I. may be especially vulnerable to a tear-it-down approach, since it came into existence through an administrative decision within the Justice Department, and thus has no founding congressional charter outlining its purpose and duties. Patel is well aware that many constraints on what the Bureau says and does are governed by institutional norms and internal policy—and can, in theory, be changed as needed. Nonetheless, his own analysis of the deep state suggests that making fundamental change in a large, secretive bureaucracy will be hard. Hoover spent decades cultivating a loyal agent corps and designing procedures to serve his needs. As an outsider and a newcomer, Patel has no such advantages, and his obvious scorn for the Bureau’s leadership probably won’t help.

Half a century ago, another President tried to install a political loyalist as F.B.I. director. It did not go well. In 1972, Nixon appointed his longtime ally, the D.O.J. official L. Patrick Gray, to succeed Hoover as acting director. Inside the Bureau, career officials resisted. Within a few months, the F.B.I. executive W. Mark Felt was leaking details about Watergate to the Washington Post, earning the nickname Deep Throat. By mid-1973, Gray had left office. Nixon did the same in 1974.

Trump has already shown his ability to withstand far greater pressure than even Nixon faced. Indeed, part of his genius is that all the denunciations and impeachments and indictments seem only to have increased his power and popularity. During his first term, it took him four months to fire James Comey, who had been nominated as F.B.I. director by Barack Obama. Trump’s stated complaint—an amusing bit of political theatre—was that Comey had been unfair to Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but it was understood that Trump was worried about the Russia investigation. This time, he has already promised to get rid of the director, Christopher Wray, even though he is the one who picked Wray in the first place.

If Trump does remove Wray, it will violate a long-standing norm distinguishing F.B.I. directors from other Presidential nominations; since they may have to investigate the Administration itself, they are supposed to be more independent and less subject to White House pressure. Patel’s approval by the Senate is not at all assured. But, if the Senate concedes to Trump’s wishes, Patel will no doubt try to use the Bureau to serve “King Donald”; potential targets are right to be worried. Perhaps he’ll succeed in shutting down the F.B.I. headquarters and dispersing its thousands of employees to the winds. Even if none of that happens, though, Patel will be able to declare a victory of sorts. By his own logic, resistance to his ideas or his appointment will merely prove that the deep state is even more nefarious than he feared. ♦