Critics Worry Kash Patel Will Purge the FBI. Would He Even Need To?

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.

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-of-center 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.

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.”

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, 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.”

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

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.

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 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 two-year 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 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 Amendment-protected 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

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.”

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 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 battle-proven 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 far-right 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.

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