Kashing in
Richard Nixon must be green with envy at the bald chutzpah of the man who replaced him as the most corrupt president ever.
Nixon, who enabled FBI directors J. Edgar Hoover and L. Patrick Gray to rain pain on his political enemies has truly been outdone by America’s first convicted felon president.
Patel is Trump’s designee to replace Christopher Wray — appointed by Trump himself after he cashiered Jim Comey for a lack of loyalty. Of course Wray would have to quit before the end of his 10-year term — or Trump could push him out for the same failure to kiss the presidential, um, ring.
Patel, on the other hand, is a flunky of the first magnitude. A lawyer by profession, he served in a series of administration positions at the tail end of Trump’s first term, including on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon. At one point he was mentioned as acting CIA or FBI director.
No lesser a Trump loyalist than William Barr declared that would only happen “over my dead body.”
The nation’s top law enforcement agency has had some real lawbreakers at the top in its history. Hoover was mythologized as the guiding “G-man” over a 48-year career where he battled machine gun-toting gangsters while leading a force of straight shooters.
Of course he did find time to oversee a 15-year campaign of spying to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” those he perceived to be the nation’s enemies. Like when he wiretapped civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“The FBI campaign against King began with wiretaps, but quickly ballooned. When wiretaps revealed that King was having extramarital affairs, the FBI shifted their focus to uncover all evidence of his infidelity by bugging and taping him in his hotel rooms and by paying informants to spy on him. Eventually, the FBI penned and sent King an anonymous letter, along with some of their tapes, suggesting that he should kill himself.”
Even Nixon was scared of the power accumulated by Hoover, in part because he worried the FBI boss would reveal his own secret, White House-ordered wiretaps of reporters and National Security Council aides suspected of leaking information.
But when Hoover died of a heart attack in 1972, Nixon wasted little time in naming Gray, whose principal task was to oversee the Watergate break-in investigation. A Nixon-endorsed bag job aimed at Democrats.
He lasted about a year, until he admitted to destroying documents that had come from convicted Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt's safe, documents received on June 28, 1972 — 11 days after the Watergate burglary — and given to Gray by White House counsel John Dean.
Patel comes straight from the Hoover-Gray “law enforcement” model.
In a 2023 interview on “War Room,” a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s onetime administrative state destroyer and prominent jail bird, Patel threatened to go after journalists if appointed to a role in a Trump administration.
“We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly — we’ll figure that out,” he said.
But journalists would not be Patel’s only targets. Not as long as there is a “deep state” around to foil Trump 2.0.
Patel is fully bought into the conspiracy that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment must be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Trump and his allies.
A view shared by Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi, Director of National Intelligence-designate Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth.
Trump hailed Patel in a social media post, saying he:
…“played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution.”
There still is the matter of getting a vacancy at FBI headquarters. The director is appointed for a 10-year term, a reflection of the problems associated with Hoover’s nearly half century grip on power. The length is also designed to overlap presidential terms, in theory taking the job out of the political realm.
Then there’s the reality of a required Senate confirmation vote. The new GOP leadership dodged a bullet when Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for attorney general.
But Republican senators have been conspicuously quiet about Bondi, Gabbard, Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.Kennedy Jr.’s fate.
Trump may be a lame duck under the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. But since when has that founding document meant anything to him? Especially in a term he has defined as focusing on retribution. With Republicans who stand in his way as vulnerable as journalists.