Critics Worry Kash Patel Will Purge the FBI Would He Even Need To rollingstone com politics politics-features kash-patel-fbi-director-nominee-purge-1235273360 Already Radical “An unnervingly large percentage of the agency will be sympathetic to what Patel wants to do ” a former FBI agent tells Rolling Stone February 20 2025 Photo illustration by Matthew Cooley Photographs in illustration by Jeffrey Markowitz Sygma Getty Images Mandel NGAN AFP Getty Images Kent Nishimura Getty Images At the first rally to kick off his 2024 campaign Donald Trump played a bizarre rendition of the national anthem in which he himself recites the Pledge of Allegiance while a “choir” of January 6 rioters sing the national anthem It would become a regular feature at his rallies Some of the choir on that recording were convicted of assaulting police officers The song was released as a single with proceeds going to the prisoners and their families One of the producers of that single was Kash Patel who also established a private foundation to raise money for the prisoners and their families 1 16 Now that same Kash Patel has won Senate approval to lead the largest most prestigious law enforcement agency in the federal government The Trump era has wrought a bizarro-world dynamic in which Democratic leaders and MSNBC pundits now defend the integrity of the FBI an agency that for decades has illegally targeted spied on and sowed dissent among civil rights Muslim anti-war and other left-ofcenter activist groups Meanwhile following Trump’s lead the political right has unleashed fury on one of the most conservative agencies in government alleging that the overwhelmingly white male Republican law enforcement agency has been overtaken by a leftist or “woke” agenda   Unfortunately this has created a political environment in which Democrats have been loath to implement checks and reforms on an agency that has been both slowly accumulating power since September 11 and repeatedly and unconstitutionally wielding that power often against marginalized groups   Consequently Kash Patel could do a lot of damage at the FBI without overhauling the bureau much at all FBI agents currently have extensive powers to open investigations interrogate the friends and family of targets and send informants to manipulate people all based on nothing more than conduct agents deem to be “radical” or “extreme ” Much of the time the conduct that attracts suspicion — participating in a protest converting to Islam writing for a radical website — is protected by the First Amendment or at least ought to be And despite the protests from people like Patel the brunt of these abuses have fallen disproportionately on civil rights groups Muslims and left-leaning activists rather than on militias white supremacists or right-wing parent groups The grim reality is that Patel won’t need to remake the FBI from scratch He’ll just need to marginally redirect the agency’s focus from unconstitutionally harassing groups the right has traditionally loathed to unconstitutionally harassing groups that Trump loathes personally Over the course of months of reporting former FBI agents and those who study the intelligence community have told Rolling Stone that on some level MAGA is correct The FBI is desperately in need of reform But Trump and Patel are the last people who should do the reforming Uniquely unqualified As with several of Trump’s nominees Patel isn’t merely unqualified for this position — his record ought to be disqualifying The New York Times reported that Patel has vastly overstated his experience in counterterrorism claiming he was lead prosecutor on the Benghazi investigation when according to Justice Department officials at the time his actual duties were researching material and “routing paperwork ” He has associated with far-right extremists and expressed his support for QAnon cranks He’s sold Trump-themed merchandise and pushed a pill he claims counteracts the effects of the Covid vaccine 2 16 During the 2024 campaign Patel pledged that the second Trump administration would target the president’s enemies critics and journalists who report unflattering stories about the administration “We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government but in the media ” he said “Yes we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections ” It’s likely the first time a president has nominated an FBI director who has preemptively vowed to violate the Constitution   At his hearing Patel contradicted those prior public statements pledging that he would not seek retribution against Trump’s enemies   But Patel’s promises even under oath may not mean much He previously told a Colorado district court that Trump had authorized 10 000-20 000 National Guard troops around the country to keep the peace on January 6 That isn’t quite what happened Trump had actually floated the idea of calling up some Guard troops to escort him and his supporters to the Capitol in their effort to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence to back Trump’s attempt to steal the election Patel is also now facing accusations he may have perjured himself during his confirmation hearing During questioning Sen Cory Booker asked Patel “Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way including termination FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations ” Patel answered “I’m not aware of that Senator ”  3 16 Kash Patel during the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb 23 2024 DOMINIC GWINN Middle East Images AFP Getty Images The very next day the Trump Justice Department announced it was firing eight senior FBI officials who oversaw the January 6 investigation The administration also demanded the names of every FBI agent who worked on the January 6 cases — a list that reportedly includes around 4 000 of the bureau’s 13 000 agents The administration had also already fired Justice Department attorneys who worked on the criminal cases against Trump All of these actions are likely illegal and are currently being challenged in court Last week Sen Richard Durbin’s office said that according to whistleblowers Patel “has been personally directing the ongoing purge of senior law enforcement officials at the FBI ” According to Durbin on January 29 acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove held a meeting in which he urged acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll and others that Patel wanted “action” on a list of FBI names who were to be fired or asked to resign from the bureau As Durbin wrote in a press release “Mr Patel wanted the FBI to remove targeted employees faster as DOJ had already done with prosecutors ” A pattern of abuse Since the FBI transitioned to a terrorism-fighting organization in the 1990s the agency has had an abysmal record The bureau has been repeatedly shown to have illegally spied on activist civil rights and Muslim groups while missing clear warnings about terror attacks 4 16 from September 11 to the Boston Marathon bombing to the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando And some of the complaints Patel and others on the right have about FBI abuses in the Trump era have some legitimacy It’s just that their complaints misdiagnose the causes For example the FBI began investigating Trump’s 2016 campaign in part after learning about aide Carter Page’s frequent contacts with foreign governments Page was one of the campaign aides the agency targeted after another aide George Papadopoulos boasted to an Australian diplomat about how the campaign had accessed damaging information about Hillary Clinton These in themselves intelligence experts have said were legitimate predicates for an investigation But when applying to the FISA court to renew the warrant for Page the agency learned that Page was also a source for the CIA which would have explained some of those foreign contacts An FBI attorney then deliberately misled the court about Page’s status as a CIA source DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in a subsequent report that while a few FBI investigators had criticized Trump in private messages there’s little evidence that the investigation into his campaign was motivated by political bias Investigator Peter Strzok a frequent target of Trump’s ire was off the case by the time agents applied for a FISA warrant and at times had even discouraged widening the probe Moreover most of the other omissions were made by low-level agents unlikely to have been privy to the political views of the managers overseeing the probe What the episode and subsequent investigations actually showed was not anti-Trump political bias but that the FBI has been routinely misleading the FISA court for years across all sorts of investigations In 2022 that court issued a report finding that FBI agents had improperly accessed the digital communications of American citizens over 278 000 times in just a two-year period Despite restrictions allowing agents to only use the surveillance system to investigate foreign threats the report found agents had made queries into people involved in the George Floyd protests against police violence and into thousands of donors of a single congressional campaign Agents have also queried the system for information on journalists politicians activists and political pundits “The grave defects in the surveillance of Page seem more likely to be symptoms of a more apolitical and therefore more systemic form of bias ” Julian Sanchez wrote at Just Security “Their underlying causes — reliance on sources whose claims are hard to directly check imperfect information case agents making judgments about which facts in a vast sea of data might be legally material — aren’t peculiar to elections but endemic to intelligence ” That this was not an isolated incident is certainly cause for alarm “This was a high-profile investigation of a major presidential campaign ” says Patrick Eddington a former CIA analyst who now works on national security issues for the libertarian Cato Institute “They had to know everything they did would eventually be heavily scrutinized If they were that sloppy and careless in this case we can only imagine how bad it is in other investigations ” 5 16 Conservatives have also criticized the bureau for its investigation into the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov Gretchen Whitmer D There’s merit to those criticisms too Media investigations and court records have shown that while there may have been grounds for an initial investigation the “plot” was largely driven by undercover FBI agents and informants who provoked hapless but bumbling wannabe militiamen into a fantastical scheme   But this too is standard procedure at the bureau Some of the bureau’s most touted wins have turned out to be plots that agents created for the purpose of thwarting them including the alleged plot among six men to shoot up the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey the Newburgh Four in which a federal judge later said that the federal government “came up with the crime provided the means and removed all relevant obstacles” and the cases of Rezwan Ferdaus and Sami Osmakac in which informants preyed on men with clear mental illness who were otherwise unlikely to commit a crime   A 2014 Human Rights Watch report found that between 2001 and 2013 “nearly 50 percent of the more than 500 federal counterterrorism convictions resulted from informant-based cases ” and that “almost 30 percent of those cases were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot ” In some cases informants focused on targets who suffered from depression or mental illness or were developmentally or intellectually disabled “There are major problems at the bureau ” says Luke William Hunt a former agent who now teaches philosophy at the University of Alabama “It has consistently accumulated more power since September 11 Individual agents have access to far too much information about us and can open investigations into anyone with little evidence of criminality There’s no transparency and very little accountability But I’d put political bias against conservatives very low on the list of problems ” The fear from progressives and Democrats is that Patel will radicalize the agency purge it of its dedicated public servants and replace them with MAGA lackeys who will weaponize their powers to target Trump’s enemies But while former FBI officials and civil libertarians who study the agency share that fear they say it glosses over an important reality Many at the agency are already on board with Trump “The uncomfortable truth here is that Patel wouldn’t have to purge that many people ” says Mike German a former FBI agent and current senior fellow with the Brennan Center German emphasized that he and the Brennan Center take no official position on Patel’s nomination “I think an unnervingly large percentage of the agency will be sympathetic to what Patel wants to do And I think they’d be pretty open about that ” The question then is just how much damage could Patel do Thousands of mini-Hoovers 6 16 Patel inherits an agency that has been accumulating power for decades — and has imposed little to no accountability on agents who abuse it Longtime FBI director J Edgar Hoover is infamous for his dossiers on the rich and influential He then leveraged the information he’d collected to protect the bureau’s image — and to advance a culturally 1950s worldview which prioritized the preservation of the country’s racial and social order   Hoover believed that policing radicalism — infiltrating spying on and subverting fringe and activist groups — was the key to public safety and national security He also didn’t have much time for the constitutional barriers in his way such as obtaining search warrants   J Edgar Hoover during his time at the FBI Bettmann Archive Getty Images Hoover’s decades of abuse were exposed during the 1975 congressional hearings led by Idaho Sen Frank Church One Nixon aide who oversaw the administration’s surveillance program confessed to the Church Committee that the bureau’s obsession with radicalism 7 16 meant investigations inevitably digressed from “the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign and from the kid with a picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate And you just keep going down the line ” The Church Committee’s work resulted in a number of reforms to the FBI and other intelligence agencies But within a decade the Reagan administration then began rolling them back The rollback continued for 20 years across multiple administrations The September 11 attacks were the final blow Six weeks after the attacks Congress passed the PATRIOT Act which allowed for roving wiretaps “sneak and peek” warrants and National Security Letters which allowed the agency to collect troves of digital information without a warrant — while forbidding both the target and the companies providing the data from telling anyone A report from the DOJ Inspector General found that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI used National Security Letters 143 000 times resulting in just 153 “criminal proceedings ” Many of those were for crimes unrelated to terrorism The IG found only one terror-related conviction Another report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that of the tens of thousands of times the “sneak and peek” provision was used between 2010 and 2013 — a power allowing agents to search homes and offices and even seize property without notifying suspects — less than 1 percent of those were related to terrorism The overwhelming majority were related to drug crimes But the most substantive post-9 11 change came in 2008 when then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey effectively ended the Church reform requirement that for the FBI to open a case it must have criminal predicate — i e reasonable suspicion of a crime Mukasey created a new category of investigation called an assessment which requires no criminal predicate at all Agents can open assessments based solely on a hunch Assessments allow agents to utilize physical surveillance interview a target’s acquaintances and deploy informants to extract information or as it would later be shown to bait targets into committing crimes they otherwise would never have committed DOJ officials insisted at the time that such investigations would be rare and limited to national security investigations but The New York Times reported in 2011 that over a twoyear period the agency had opened over 80 000 assessments About half were related to national security the others were for conventional crimes Meanwhile only 4 5 percent of the national security assessments and a little over 3 percent of the other assessments led to broader investigations Incredibly according to FBI guidelines an assessment opened with no evidence of criminal activity can remain open until “a judgment can be made that the target does not pose a terrorism or criminal threat ” As the Brennan Center’s Rachel Levinson-Waldman wrote in a 8 16 2013 report “In other words until and unless a negative is proven the assessment can remain open allowing for continued collection of information on presumptively innocent people ” “The dossiers Hoover kept on powerful people were boxes of files sitting in an office or warehouse ” German says “But we’re in the digital age now Remember that famous phrase from the Edward Snowden leaks — ‘total information awareness ’ The intelligence approach since 9 11 and the PATRIOT Act has been to gobble up all the information all the data So travel records passenger data banking records cell phone data — it’s all there on everyone all the time ” Instead of an agency led by a single Hoover the FBI now has thousands of mini-Hoovers all with the power to sift through exabytes of information with fewer restrictions on that power than ever To an overtly political actor like Patel it could be a treasure trove of leverage blackmail material or fodder for character assassination “We’ve discovered that the FBI has been investigating a wide range of groups with little evidence of wrongdoing from the conservative Concerned Women for America to the Muslim Justice League to mostly non-political groups like the National Security Archive ” says Eddington The culprit is an arrogant and organizational culture misplaced bureaucratic incentives and a sprinkling of political agenda here and there ” Since the rollback of the Church reforms after September 11 the FBI has been shown to have spied on the anti-war movement the Occupy protests the Keystone pipeline protests Black Lives Matter leaders even the Burning Man festival A trove of documents leaked in 2017 showed that despite assurances from leaders that the agency doesn’t permit racial or religious profiling and doesn’t investigate First Amendmentprotected activity “national security” exceptions to those rules allow agents to open investigations on the vaguest of suspicions including suspicions grounded in race religion or national origin Other exceptions allow the agency to secretly investigate journalists and politicians though in theory those actions would require approval from the attorney general   It’s in this context that Trump and his supporters are right about the “deep state ” An FBI agent can open an investigation on any person at any time before they have any evidence that person has committed a crime They can surveil you comb your electronic footprint and send informants to trick you mislead you undermine you or bait you into criminal conduct   The problem is that Patel doesn’t want to end these abuses He wants to weaponize them against his enemies Plowing through guardrails 9 16 As with many of the policies Trump has blitzkrieged since the start of his new administration it’s difficult to assess what of the many abuses Patel and other Trump supporters have vowed are actually doable But those who study the FBI say what they can do under current bureau guidelines is worrying enough The fear is what Patel and the administration will do with the information they collect from assessments — and what they may do from there “Given how much data is in the hands of commercial companies — especially geolocation data … they could engage in a pretty highly reliable form of tracking Trump’s political opponents without ever going before a federal judge to get a warrant ” Eddington says “Nobody is administratively pure ” German adds “Look hard and long enough at anyone and you’ll inevitably find something At the very least you can selectively sort through the volumes of information to paint whatever picture of that person you want If you get on an agent’s radar if you become a thorn in an agent’s side they can find something on you Hoover would blush at the scope of it ” Black Lives Matter protesters on Long Island New York on June 6 2020 Steve Pfost Newsday RM Getty Images The agency’s traditional reliance on radicalism and extremism as proxies for dangerousness could also allow a bad actor to order yet more surveillance of groups like Black Lives Matter the ACLU immigrant rights groups and other Trump critics by claiming they’re a 10 16 threat to national security Trump’s open-ended claim that undocumented immigrants are leading an “invasion” could justify similar surveillance of immigrant advocacy groups The new administration has made clear that it doesn’t see any of the existing checks and guardrails as impediments and that they’ll summarily dismiss anyone who tries to invoke policy or law to impede Trump’s agenda Pam Bondi Trump’s attorney general is a battleproven MAGA loyalist who volunteered her legal expertise to his scheme to overturn the 2020 election “The FBI’s power is dependent on the attorney general and the power vest in that office ” Hunt says “So yes with the support of the AG the FBI director could make sweeping changes to existing rules and guidelines ” Of course the biggest worry is that Patel will direct the FBI to start arresting and jailing Trump’s critics The experts I spoke to for this article said that’s not at the top of their list of concerns Jailing people for constitutionally-protected acts would require approval from a U S attorney and the attorney general and the administration would then be forced to justify its actions in federal court   “I won’t say it could never happen But if it gets to that point we’re already in a lot of trouble ” German says But in the time since German told me that we’ve already seen movement in that direction Ed Martin Trump’s acting U S Attorney for the District of Columbia threatened federal employees who obstruct Elon Musk’s employees at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency DOGE from accessing sensitive payment and classified information He also threatened journalists and others who revealed the identities of the DOGE workers “An active investigation alone can be debilitating to people just trying to live their lives ” German says Hunt agrees “In addition to the loss of time and money — attorney fees and so on — there are the more intangible losses regarding a person’s privacy and sense of control Lives can be turned upside down considering the deep sense of vulnerability and uncertainty that tends to accompany investigations ” Former FBI agent Terry Albury who went to prison for leaking documentation of abuses at the bureau told The New York Times in 2021 “There is this mythology that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people ”  “I helped destroy people ” he said “For 17 years ”  An unscrupulous FBI director could selectively release information obtained through assessments to ruin the reputations of Trump’s perceived enemies 11 16 An even more likely route for the administration is to open criminal investigations of advocacy groups Such investigations could scare off donors bring crippling legal expenses or result in subpoenas with compliance costs that could bankrupt smaller organizations — all before any accusations could be tested in court   Here too we’re already seeing some movement Bondi has issued a memo to attorneys in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division instructing them to investigate possible criminal charges relating to diversity equity and inclusion DEI policies If upheld by the courts such an order could effectively make a group like the NAACP illegal We’ve also seen administration officials like “border czar” Tom Homan threaten that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be “in trouble” for “crossing a line” after she hosted a webinar informing immigrants of their constitutional rights New priorities Trump has made it clear that mass deportations are his top priority and that nearly very part of the federal government will be tasked with contributing to their execution   The administration already started redirecting FBI personnel — along with personnel from the DEA and ATF — to assist with immigration enforcement This is unprecedented and it means fewer federal law enforcement officers will be policing organized crime espionage fentanyl smuggling potential terror attacks and other actual crimes Immigration violations are a civil violation not criminal One of Trump’s week-one executive orders directs the DOJ to prioritize immigration enforcement above everything else including organized crime violent crime and terrorism Another EO revokes a Biden administration policy directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize deporting people with violent criminal records and those accused of drug and human trafficking over people who have been living here peacefully without documentation During his first term Trump had revoked a similar Obama-era policy targeting violent immigrants He wanted to target people seeking asylum The administration has already stopped claiming it will deport violent people first insisting incorrectly that anyone here without documentation is a criminal The administration also told federal law enforcement officers to be camera-ready when making arrests In other words the administration is prioritizing performative cruelty and making headlines to sow as much fear in the immigrant community as possible — all at the expense of conventional law enforcement “If President Trump is ordering FBI personnel to prioritize immigration investigations and operations over finding and prosecuting Communist Chinese spies who are remorselessly hacking our telecommunications and stealing our intellectual property he’s giving aid and 12 16 comfort to Xi Jinping and his authoritarian regime and making America less safe in the process ” Eddington says Another fear is that under Patel the FBI will stop investigating or even enable far-right violence   The FBI has prioritized fighting radical Islamic terrorism since the September 11 attacks Though domestic political violence since then has come overwhelmingly from the right the agency continued investigating activist groups creating a new category of terrorism called “Black Identity Extremism ” Even after white supremacist-motivated mass shootings in El Paso Pittsburgh and Buffalo — and those shooters’ adoption of rhetoric often heard from Trump and the MAGA movement — the bureau’s focus on racial justice activists continued Despite multiple reports that white supremacist groups have been infiltrating every level of law enforcement the FBI has done little to address the problem When asked at a 2019 congressional hearing about this FBI assistant director for counterterrorism Michael McGarrity cited the First Amendment rights of police officers — an irony the bureau’s critics found hard to swallow “You have a constitutional right to be a white supremacist ” Eddington says “You don’t have a constitutional right to be a white supremacist while also carrying a government-issue gun and badge and while you patrol black neighborhoods ” “Would a Bondi-Patel DOJ-FBI try to make use of Proud Boy chapters Patriot Front elements or Moms for Liberty to target opponents All of these are unfortunately live possibilities ” Eddington says When Trump was asked recently if there’s a place for groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in the national conversation he said “We’ll have to see ” Ideally the FBI should be a last bulwark against constitutional abuses by state and local police when local officials refuse to hold them accountable This role was expanded under the Obama administration rolled back during the first Trump administration then expanded again under Biden after the murder of George Floyd   13 16 Members of the Proud Boys march past the J Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington D C during Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20 2025 ALI KHALIGH Middle East Images AFP Getty Images But the agency often only gets involved after public outcry and is often inhibited by its ideological blinders After the death of Elijah McCalin at the hands of police and paramedics in Aurora Colorado for example the FBI might have looked into that police department’s astonishing record of abuse Instead the Denver field office hired an informant to spy on the people protesting McClain’s death and provoke them into committing crimes “For your typical FBI agent the black kid who goes to a protest and calls for abolishing the police is a threat to the social order ” German says “The officers who beat that kid at the protest are trying to preserve it During the 2020 protests in Portland you had 100 days of protests and a police department was under a years-long consent decree with the DOJ about abuse of force ” German says “The DOJ identified 6 000 out of policy uses of force by Portland police Not a single civil rights violation was prosecuted It was a similar story all over the country ” But when a police abuse incident does manage to attract enough public outrage the bureau has stepped in to investigate That may soon end too Trump has paused all federal investigations into and reform agreements with state and local police abuse an order that threatens the consent decrees with Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd and with Louisville after the death of Breonna Taylor   14 16 During the 2024 campaign Trump not only promised “immunity” for all law enforcement officers nevermind that this isn’t really something he can do he suggested he may have federal law enforcement investigate progressive prosecutors who charge abusive cops with crimes — for violating the civil rights of those officers   “I will direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical left prosecutor’s offices such as those in Chicago LA and San Francisco to determine whether they have illegally engaged in race-based enforcement of the law ” Trump said in a 2023 video posted by his campaign What they’ll miss As Patel redirects FBI resources from crime-fighting to retribution and grudge-settling the agency is likely to miss signs that could have allowed it to prevent domestic or international terrorism or other mass casualty events We know from history that ideological fixations can preoccupy the bureau from its core mission In the mid-1990s for example as the biggest perceived threat to the country switched from communism to radical Islam the FBI began investigating hundreds of mosques and Muslim nonprofits and civil society organizations This had the effect of alienating parts of the Muslim community which only made agents more suspicious Even as it targeted people for their religious beliefs alone the FBI failed to follow up on dozens of reports throughout the 1990s that men with actual terrorist ties — some to Osama bin Laden’s network — had been taking lessons at flight schools across the country paid in cash been cagey about why they wanted to fly and expressed interest only in navigating planes not in taking off or landing them One field office supervisor pleaded with FBI headquarters two weeks before the September 11 that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center ” The bureau didn’t seem to learn from its mistake Instead the federal government adopted its “Total Information Awareness” approach to all things Muslim “When you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack you want a system that filters out the hay and helps you find the needles ” Eddington says “The FBI’s approach after September 11 was to keep adding more hay to the stack ” Reports by inspectors general and other oversight bodies pointed to cascading failures that prevented the agency from more thoroughly investigating 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev and possibly preventing the attack despite a tip from Russian intelligence that he was potentially dangerous and that he’d left the U S to spend six months in an area of the Caucuses known to be a training ground for terrorists 15 16 Yet the FBI has continued to prioritize policing radical Islam environmental groups and civil rights activists in the face of a rising tide of right-wing extremism from the Proud Boys to the Oathkeepers to the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division which picked up momentum after Charlottesville and has been actively recruiting in the U S military   Eddington worries that under Patel the bureau may not just ignore far-right violence it may actually align itself with it “I fear that we may see a move to try to federally deputize not only more state local law enforcement personnel to help out with political or other dubiously predicated investigations but also tap outside groups loyal to Trump for “investigative assistance ” he says   German points out that the FBI has never really prioritized investigating or preventing farright and militia violence — and it’s never addressed white supremacists’ infiltration of law enforcement despite multiple federal government reports warning about the problem “I don’t think your typical agent sympathizes with white supremacists but I do think he sees them as harmless ” he says “For him white supremacists are just the old KKK guys who meet at the Waffle House ” This problem too is likely to get worse under Patel who has aligned himself with far-right personalities and podcasters and has the support of groups like the Oath Keepers But critics caution that it would be a mistake for the FBI to start policing the right for radicalism in the same way it now polices Islamic extremism or leftist activism as some have demanded “I struggle with it in theory because the tactics are a violation but so is the unequal application of them ” German says “But in the end these tactics just don’t work I don’t know how many more examples we need to prove this You don’t prevent terror attacks by monitoring social media memes looking for swastikas or counting how many times someone goes to the mosque You prevent them by looking for evidence of criminality ” It’s worth noting just how dire our discussion of these issues have moved in just the last few weeks I first interviewed Luke Hunt in 2023 long before Trump won a second term and long before it was thought possible that an ideologue like Patel could lead it When I asked him what he made of the partisan discussion of the FBI he said “To the extent that there were abuses in the investigation into the Trump campaign they were abuses that have been perpetrated against less powerful people forever The far more important question is is the FBI today a liberal or an illiberal institution ” The new administration seems determined to destroy whatever liberal influence remains Radley Balko reports on criminal justice and civil liberties Subscribe to his newsletter The Watch 16 16