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04-12-2024
WASHINGTON: Critics of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI have expressed doubts that he is qualified to lead the US government’s principal law enforcement agency.
Some also raised fears that Kash Patel, a marginal figure in Trump’s first administration known for his loyalty, aims to dismantle an apolitical federal security service and refashion it into a means of partisan retribution.
“Look, 99.9% of the bureau is made up of hard working agents who adhere to the principles of fidelity, bravery and integrity,” Jeff Lanza, a former FBI agent, said but “he’s said that he’s coming in to just decimate the agency. How is that going to go well and how will that play into the morale of the agents who have to work under him?”
The FBI director leads 37,000 employees across 55 US field offices. They also oversee 350 satellite offices and more than 60 other foreign locations expected to cover almost 200 countries.
Former FBI and Department of Justice officials who spoke to media said the job is difficult, and it would be nearly impossible for someone like Patel, who has limited management experience, to operate effectively.
Gregory Brower, a former FBI assistant director and deputy general counsel who worked closely with the past two directors, called the job “nonstop”.
“It’s relentless. It’s high stakes. It requires media.
When he announced his pick for FBI director, Trump called Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People”.
Patel began his career as a federal public defender in Miami before working as a terrorism prosecutor at the Department of Justice between 2014 and 2017. He then spent two years as senior aide to Republicans who led the House Intelligence Committee, reportedly fighting the investigation of Trump and Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, he was hired as a staffer on Trump’s National Security Council. In February 2020, he became principal deputy in the Office of Director of National Intelligence then led by acting director Richard Grenell.
By November of that year, he had moved to the Pentagon to serve as chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, a position he held until Trump left office two months later.
“Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic Director,” Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump transition spokesman, told media.
Those critical of Patel cite past FBI directors, many of whom worked their way up through the justice department or FBI for decades, as a better measure of the qualifications needed to lead the agency.
“It’s certainly not like the backgrounds that we’ve seen other directors of the FBI and those who have overseen other similarly sized and important federal agencies bring to their jobs,” Brower said of Patel’s experience. Some pointed to former US Attorney General Bill Barr’s recollection in his 2022 memoir of Trump’s attempt to place Patel in a senior FBI position in his first term to stress the point further.
“I categorically opposed making Patel deputy FBI director. I told Mark Meadows it would happen ‘over my dead body,’” he wrote. “Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary to run the day-to-day operations of the bureau.” (Int’l News Desk)
