Former FBI officials have warned that Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next FBI director, Kash Patel, could have limitless power at the bureau as they confront the likelihood that he will be confirmed next year after locking down support from key Republicans and the current director’s intention to resign.
The alarm has come as Patel, who has called for shutting down FBI headquarters and drafted what critics call an ‘enemies list’ of Patel’s opponents, appears set to have his nomination supported unanimously by Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee.
The problem with Patel leading the FBI in the second Trump administration is that typical checks on the power of the FBI director would almost certainly be gone, according to former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi and other former officials familiar with the matter.
Patel is almost certain to install his own chief of staff and a new FBI general counsel to sign off on any campaign of retribution, while Pam Bondi, the Trump pick for attorney general, has previously echoed Patel’s aims to make the agency subservient to the White House.
“I don’t think people truly realize how powerful an FBI director can be, unrestrained,” Figliuzzi recently said on the Highly Conflicted podcast. “You want to open a case and call it a threat assessment or a preliminary investigation, you can do it.
“If the FBI director wants to get a press conference together, not tell the DoJ, and make pronouncements to the public about a case opening or a case closing or someone should be prosecuted, they can do it.
“And then going through files? I imagine on the first day in office, he’s going to say, ‘I need every file that has the word Trump in it,’” Figliuzzi said. “That should be a real concern, that Kash Patel is going through informant files and saying, ‘Look at that, this guy coughed it up on Trump.’”
Trump settled on Patel to be the next FBI director – he soured on the current director, Chris Wray, partly for not blocking the criminal investigation into his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago – after he demonstrated personal loyalty and espoused the same distrust of the agency.
Patel has no experience working at the bureau and his national security experience has mainly come through the lens of Trump politics, including when he was a staffer on the House intelligence committee during the first Trump presidency before joining the administration itself.
That résumé has drawn criticism from former FBI officials who have privately questioned whether Patel has any knowledge of how the FBI operates and whether attempts to launch partisan, political investigations would distract from other counterterrorism or criminal probes.
Figliuzzi also suggested that Patel working in tandem with the Trump White House could exert influence over things like background checks, both for first-time applicants for security clearances and reinvestigations of people who previously went through FBI vetting.
“Agents know how to do a background investigation,” Figliuzzi said, “but once it gets to headquarters, can it be manipulated by somebody like Kash Patel? You bet. What gets to his desk and what gets to the Oval Office might be two very different things.
“Now that’s not supposed to happen, but you know where that happens? Not only in my experience, but we’ve all seen it with Justice Kavanaugh – the reinvestigation.
“When there’s a reinvestigation, that would apply to anybody who’s already had a federal background [investigation] done for their position. And guess what? Those are different. The White House dictates the parameters of a reinvestigation, which is permitted.”
