OPINION:
If any one Cabinet choice of President Trump demonstrates his keen awareness of the forces that conspired to disrupt his first term and his determination to short-circuit the deep state efforts to hamstring his second, it is his selection of his former senior adviser on national security Kash Patel to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
While it is not a pick that pleases the entrenched intelligence community allies among Republican Party leadership in Congress, ensuring that the Senate confirms Mr. Patel will be essential if Mr. Trump is to accomplish his policy objectives.
Mr. Trump recognized the problem of a rogue FBI attempting to undermine his presidency when he fired Director James B. Comey in May 2017. His choice of Christopher A. Wray, a candidate backed by Republican establishment figures with deep connections to the permanent intel bureaucracy in Washington, did nothing to tame the out-of-control agency.
Mr. Wray failed to wind down the ludicrous Russia collusion investigation that his predecessor Mr. Comey had hatched to cripple Mr. Trump’s presidency, and he quickly showed himself utterly unequipped for the task of rooting out the institutional corruption at the agency that has long infected the seventh floor of the Hoover Building headquarters.
Mr. Wray’s feckless leadership allowed antifa (a terrorist group he called “more of an ideology than an organization”) to run rampant and acted as the enforcement apparatus of a politicized Department of Justice under Biden administration Attorney General Merrick Garland, rounding up both grassroots Trump supporters and even senior advisers of the former president under the guise of an effort to root out “domestic terrorism.”
It is telling that many prominent Republican figures advised Mr. Trump against replacing Mr. Wray for fear of provoking the same kind of firestorm that Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey set off in 2017.
The argument now, as it was then, is that the FBI has become a virtually independent branch of the government whose nonpartisan reputation and conduct demand a continuity of leadership that transcends presidential administrations. Originating with J. Edgar Hoover (whose reign of terror at the FBI spanned eight presidencies) and confirmed in establishment circles after the Watergate scandal, the conventional wisdom became that the FBI needed to be above politics and partisan agendas and avoid at all costs being perceived as a tool of the president used for retribution against political enemies.
Sans the cross-dressing fetish, Mr. Wray was every bit the political and ideological successor to Hoover, who wielded his power over his political enemies with a ruthlessness rarely seen in developed countries. Mr. Wray seemingly wielded it with zeal as he rummaged through first lady Melania Trump’s lingerie drawers. J. Edgar must be proudly, and even a little jealously, looking down — or up — with approval. Under the likes of Messrs. Comey and Wray, the FBI’s mission expanded well beyond Hoover’s penchant for collecting damaging information on his political opponents to the point where the directors now see themselves as the enforcement arm of the deep state against all domestic dissenters.
But the truth is that scaling back the mission of the bureau to that of a domestic intelligence and investigative arm of the executive branch reporting to the Justice Department would be the only conceivable way of curbing the mission creep that created the bureaucratic behemoth of the post-9/11 FBI, unanswerable to any political branch and now regularly employed to enforce an elite, globalist consensus about foreign and domestic policy on a noncompliant American population.
Rather than exercising true oversight over this leviathan, successive generations of congressional leadership have been absorbed into the establishment Borg of the existing intelligence community consensus, seeing their access to top-secret intelligence briefings as a mandate to impose that consensus on a skeptical nation and target meddlesome dissenters.
With his experience as senior aide on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, at the Pentagon, and as senior adviser to Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Mr. Patel has intimate knowledge of the modern FBI and how it has been turned against the American people. He also understands how to bring the agency to heel and put a halt to the unconstitutional surveillance and armed raids against Americans whose only crime has been to dissent from the uniparty establishment narrative. Because he poses such a mortal threat to their power, the “intel community,” along with its many minions in both parties in Congress, are opposing him with all their might.
Mr. Patel’s identification of the “government gangsters” who have hijacked our intelligence services has made him public enemy No. 1 in the eyes of those forces. His confirmation is perhaps the last opportunity to break that community’s grip on our democratic republic.
• Rob Wasinger was director of Senate relations for the Trump transition team in 2016 and the first White House liaison at the State Department during the Trump administration.
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