“The transformation of the FBI back into a J. Edgar Hoover-style domestic spy service with sweeping political ambition has been a long-developing story, obscured by a political anomaly.”
“I have no idea if Kash Patel will do a good job or if he’ll even make it to office, but answering the question of why he was chosen as FBI Director isn’t hard: ironically, it’s the FBI that now needs to be disrupted, urgently, and he’s at least shown a willingness to do it. I doubt they’ll go quietly.”
By Ginny Garner
President-elect Trump nominated Kash Patel, author of the aptly titled book “Government Gangsters,” to head the FBI. Matt Taibbi wrote an interesting article explaining the unconstitutional overreach of the FBI from the 1960s to present as a force to disrupt domestic political dissent to a spy surveillance agency and its dubious attempts at redemption by portraying itself as a serial killer chaser in the 1980s-90s:
When I heard Kash Patel had been tabbed by Donald Trump to run the FBI, I could already imagine the pushback and moved immediately to start the just-published article “The Bell Finally Tolls for the FBI” piece. The thought was that the role Patel played in preparing the “Nunes memo” was both the clearest example of media corruption from Trump’s first term and also the most easily demonstrated episode of FBI malfeasance. Since I had to spend an unnatural amount of time on the topic over the years (it even intersected with the Twitter Files and Hamilton 68) I quickly found myself in the weeds of the “memo” tale, when there’s a larger argument about why the FBI needs a major reorganization that someone needs to make amid what’s already an ugly fight about Patel’s nomination:
The transformation of the FBI back into a J. Edgar Hoover-style domestic spy service with sweeping political ambition has been a long-developing story, obscured by a political anomaly. In the first phase of this nightmare, between 2001 and 2016, the post-9/11 Bureau used the pretext of an enhanced counterintelligence mandate to throw off some mild restraints that had been placed on it the last time it had to be slapped down, i.e. after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. The second phase of its transformation took place after the election of Donald Trump, when the Bureau remade itself on the fly as a kind of government-in-exile, empowered by an outpouring of public and media support to view itself as a counterweight to the Trump government.
This dichotomy has probably helped prevent a full portrait of the FBI’s makeover from appearing. The more troubling aspects to phase one were mostly found in reports by a then-adversarial ACLU or in testimonials of agents and investigators who spoke out in places like Democracy Now! or the Southern Poverty Law Center, with examples being people like Colleen Rowley and Mike German. The post-Trump exposes of FBI excess meanwhile often appeared in places like Mollie Hemingway’s The Federalistor broadcasts by the likes of Tucker Carlson or even sites like The Conservative Treehouse, and the signature FBI whistleblowers of this period were agents like Steve Friend, Garrett O’Boyle and Marcus Allen, testifying in front of Republican elected officials like Jim Jordan.
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