The damage to the reputation and integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation began decades ago when President Harry Truman worried that its first director J. Edgar Hoover was taking the FBI in a "Gestapo-like" direction. Later, President Richard Nixon told advisors Hoover should resign:
"We have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me."
In this century under the Obama and Biden administrations, the agency irreversibly sullied the FBI's viability suggested former FBI assistant director Tom Fuentes in a recent Newsweek interview:"The last president that I served under was George W. Bush and it wasn't Bush's FBI. And that's how we felt — it was the American people's FBI, and the loyalty was to the constitution." That pervasive belief within the 35,000-employee federal agency later changed significantly during the Obama and Biden administrations, Fuentes said, and further deteriorated amid [Christopher] Wray's leadership and the confirmation of Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021. "Those presidents wanted it to be their FBI and under their thumb."
Meanwhile, NBC News has reported that Wray is privately preparing for a forced exit, according to "three people familiar with the matter." And President-elect Donald Trump is believed to be serious about not only replacing Wray but eliminating corruption down to the field office level, Cato Senior Fellow Patrick Eddington told Newsweek.The person mentioned most frequently as a likely replacement of Wray is 44-year-old Kash Patel, one of the few intelligence officials trusted by Trump during the final months of his first term. In recent days, former FBI official and Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers also reportedly met with Trump's transition team at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Decisive and even drastic action is called for to restore faith in this nation's system of governance.
Trump's attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz has repeatedly accused President Joe Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department to target political opponents including especially Trump and his attorneys and supporters. He has suggested that some federal agencies, including the FBI, should be defunded or abolished altogether.
While some have been said to suggest Rogers would be a "shrewd" choice, he is not the right man to undertake this urgent and consequential challenge.
Kash Patel has been consistent and relentless in calling out abuses by the FBI during the fake "Russiagate" scandal early in the first Trump Administration and that have escalated during the past four years after Trump left the White House. He also focused attention on the work of Special Counsel John Durham who was appointed to prosecute if necessary and:
to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, Ill.Kash Patel is uniquely qualified to head the FBI, investigate its operations and — if determined necessary — to eliminate the agency, making possible a fresh start for a nation returning to its founding values.
