“Disaster for national security”
He should make the FBI a gun against Trump’s opponent
21.02.2025 – 2:58 p.m.Reading time: 4 min.
Kash Patel is a tough trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist with connections to Moscow. What does the new FBI boss do?
The FBI is one of the most powerful institutions in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is a nationwide law enforcement agency and domestic intelligence in one. There is no comparable authority in Germany. After the experience with the “Secret State Police” of the Nazis, intelligence and law enforcement were deliberately divided into the Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Criminal Police Office in order to make state abuse of power more difficult. This experience may only be imminent for the United States.
With Kash Patel, the Republican-dominated US senate confirmed a die-hard Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist with connections to Russia and China at the head of the FBI on Thursday. With 51 to 49 votes, the result was extremely scarce. The three predecessors of Patels received at least 92 of the 100 votes in the Senate.
This result already shows how controversial and feared by many is the 44-year-old lawyer from New York. “It would be a disaster for national security if Mr. Patel was confirmed,” said the Democratic Senator Dick Durbin before coordination. Patel “repeatedly expressed his intention to use the most important law enforcement agency in our nation to practice retaliation on his political enemies”. Many FBI employees should also look at the future under their new boss.
In his book “Gangster in the government: The deep state, the truth and the struggle for our democracy” from 2023, Patel calls the authority “an instrument for surveillance and oppression of American citizens”, whose competencies belonged drastically. Even the title of the book shows deeply: The idea of a “deep state”-secret networks within the authority apparatus-is one of the most powerful conspiracy theories in recent years and fueled the so-called Q-anon movement in the United States.
Against this background, Patel’s statements after his confirmation in the Senate also seemed as a threat: the US citizens deserved “an FBI that is transparent, responsible and committed to justice”, Patel wrote on X. “The politicization of our judicial system has trust undermine the public.
Even before Patel’s confirmation in office, the unrest was great at the FBI with its approximately 30,000 employees and hundreds of offices across the country. Trump’s new Minister of Justice Pam Bondi, who is headed by the authority, recently accused the previous FBI leadership “disobedient” in connection with the investigation into the Capitol Sturm on January 6, 2021. FBI employees who “only followed orders” would have nothing to fear.
However, anyone who took part in the investigation against Trump in “corrupt or partisan intentions” could either be disciplined or even released, the memo said from the Ministry of Justice. Trump had always condemned the investigation into his role in the storm on the US parliament after his first term as a “witch hunt” and threatened the FBI with consequences if he became president again. This threat is apparently supposed to be implemented his faithful Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.
Patel had already excelled as a line -like supporter of the Republican during Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021. In the intelligence agency of the House of Representatives, Patel aggressively worked against the investigation into Trump’s Russia connections and the influence of the 2016 election in 2016. Patel’s use was rewarded by various subordinate posts in Trump’s government team.
What exactly patel is going on with the FBI is unclear. In an interview, he recently spoke of wanting to “decentralize” the authority and to close the headquarters in Washington. It is also feared that the investigators will be released on political opponents of the President in the future.
