WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Kash Patel as a powerful ally in his bid to upend America’s top law enforcement agency and remove people deemed “co-conspirators” from the government. He said he would nominate him to be FBI director. This is President Trump’s latest bombshell to the Washington establishment and will test how far Senate Republicans will go in confirming his nominee.
The selection is in line with President Trump’s view that fundamental changes are needed in the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and his stated desire to retaliate against his supposed adversaries. This comes at a time when President Trump, still resentful of the years-long federal investigation that overshadowed his first administration and later led to his own indictment, has turned to the FBI, which he believes will protect him rather than monitor him. This shows that he is trying to place him at the top of the Justice Department.
Patel “played a pivotal role in debunking Russia, Russia, Russian disinformation, and served as a champion of truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” President Trump said in a social media post Saturday night. I wrote it in a post.
The announcement means that current FBI Director Christopher Wray will resign or be fired after Trump takes office on January 20th. Wray was previously nominated by Trump to begin a 10-year term. That term was intended to insulate the FBI from political influence. Regime change — in 2017 after President Trump fired his predecessor, James Comey.
The decision comes not long after President Trump’s first nominee to head the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination amid intense scrutiny over sex trafficking allegations, leading to what is likely to be an explosive confirmation battle in the Senate. caused the situation. Although Patel is a little-known figure, his nomination was still expected to cause a shock. He supported Trump’s rhetoric about the “deep state,” called on Trump to conduct a “comprehensive cleanup” of disloyal government officials, called journalists traitors, and vowed to try to prosecute some of them.
Mr. Trump’s nominee will have allies in the Republican-controlled Senate next year, but it is unclear whether Mr. Trump’s nomination is certain. Republicans have a narrow majority, meaning they will only lose a few defectors in the face of expected Democratic opposition consolidation, but J.D. Vance as vice president could break the tie. Dew.
However, the president-elect has also raised the possibility of using a loophole in Congress that allows him to make appointments while the Senate is not in session to force his own appointments without Senate approval.
Ray fell out of favor with the president and his allies. His firing was unexpected given his long-standing public criticism of President Trump and the FBI, particularly the federal investigation and the FBI’s search of classified documents on the Mar-a-Lago property two years ago that led to the indictment. That’s not the point. What has evaporated.
In his final months in office, Trump unsuccessfully pushed for Patel to become deputy director of either the FBI or the CIA in a bid to tighten the president’s control over the intelligence agencies. Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, wrote in his memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel’s appointment as FBI deputy director would happen “over my dead body.” are.
“Mr. Patel had virtually no experience to qualify him to serve at the highest levels of the world’s premier law enforcement agencies,” Barr wrote.
Patel’s past proposals, if implemented, would lead to shocking changes for a government agency tasked not only with investigating violations of federal law, but also protecting the country from terrorist attacks, foreign espionage and other threats. .
He is calling for a significant reduction in the agency’s footprint, a departure from previous directors who have called for additional resources for the agency, including closing the agency’s headquarters in Washington. , proposes to “reopen the following day as a deep-sea museum.” States” — Trump’s disparaging summation of federal bureaucrats.
And while the Justice Department ended its practice of secretly seizing reporters’ phone records during leak investigations in 2021, Patel has aggressively pursued government officials who leaked information to reporters, making it easier to sue journalists. He said he intends to amend the law.
In an interview with Steve Bannon last December, Patel said he and others were “going to go find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media.”
Referring to the 2020 presidential election, in which Democratic challenger Biden defeated Trump, Patel said, “We have condemned members of the media who lied about Americans who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.” I plan to pursue it,” he said. “We’re going to pursue you both criminally and civilly. I understand that. But yes, I’ll let everyone know.”
President Trump also announced Saturday that he would nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, Florida’s top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, to head the Drug Enforcement Administration. He has worked closely with Pam Bondi, President Trump’s pick for attorney general.
Patel, the son of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, worked for several years as a prosecutor at the Justice Department before coming to the attention of the Trump administration as a staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The committee’s then-chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a strong ally of Mr. Trump, ordered Mr. Patel to lead the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election campaign. . Patel ultimately helped write a four-page report known as the Nunes Memo detailing how the Justice Department made mistakes in obtaining surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign volunteers. The release of the memo faced fierce opposition from Mr. Wray and the Justice Department, who warned that it would be reckless to release classified information.
A subsequent Inspector General report found serious problems with the FBI’s oversight during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that the FBI acted with partisan motives in conducting the investigation, and found no evidence that the FBI acted with partisan motives in conducting the investigation. He said there was a basis for this.
The Russia investigation has heightened Mr. Patel’s suspicions about the FBI, intelligence agencies and media, and he has called Mr. Patel “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.” Patel pointed to compliance failures in the FBI’s use of a spy program that officials say is vital to national security and accused the FBI of “weaponizing” its surveillance powers against innocent Americans.
Patel parlayed that work into an influential executive role on the National Security Council and then as chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.
He remained a loyal lieutenant to Mr. Trump even after leaving office, accompanying the president-elect to court during his New York criminal trial and insisting to reporters that Mr. Trump was the victim of a “constitutional circus.”
And he has been embroiled in Trump’s legal troubles since appearing two years ago before a federal grand jury investigating the hoarding of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida. I noticed that.
The president usually, but not always, continues the directorship he replaces. For example, Biden kept Wray in place even though the director was nominated by Trump, and former President Barack Obama asked Robert Mueller to keep him on for two more years. Nominated by Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush.
Trump publicly threatened to fire Wray during his first term, taking issue with Wray’s emphasis on the threat of Russian election interference at a time when Trump was focused on China. was chanting. Wray also said that Antifa, a collective term for left-wing extremists, is an ideology rather than an organization, contradicting Trump’s desire to designate it as a terrorist group.
The unassuming FBI director led the agency, which was in turmoil after Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI investigation into possible ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. He was determined to bring stability to the
Mr. Wray sought to turn the page on some of the controversies during Mr. Comey’s tenure. For example, the FBI fired the lead investigator in the Russia investigation who sent derogatory text messages about President Trump during the investigation, and removed the deputy director under Director Comey who was the central figure in the investigation. Mr. Wray also announced dozens of corrective measures aimed at preventing some of the surveillance abuses that tainted the Russia investigation.
The FBI has aggressively investigated multiple assassination attempts against Trump this year and thwarted an Iranian murder-for-hire plot targeting the president-elect, who was recently cleared of criminal charges.
But none of that was enough to spare Ray from Trump’s wrath.
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