Note on the FBI

Kash Patel will be the focus of scrutiny now, but the Bureau needs to look in the mirror. How J. Edgar Hoover's legacy was revived in the Trump years

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 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 Federalist or 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.

They were all really talking about the same subject, but their complaints were broadcast to different audiences at different stages of the Bureau’s evolution. With the exception of the audiences of people like podcaster and Provoked author Scott Horton, who kept eyes on the subject through both eras, few in the public saw the FBI story as one unbroken progression toward a fully politicized police force. I tried to do it here a little bit, making Racket home to multiple stories about the FBI’s transformation and interviewing current and former agents from both eras (Walter Kirn and I have also devoted a fair amount of time to FBI shenanigans on America This Week). Though I tried to present these stories in a way that had a chance of reaching those old Southern Poverty Law Center/ACLU audiences, I doubt they reached those ears, especially after the FBI denounced the Twitter Files as the work of “conspiracy theorists” whose “sole purpose” was “attempting to discredit the agency.”

In the 1970s a Senate Committee led by Idaho Democrat Frank Church exposed what James Risen called “Gestapo” tactics by the FBI under Hoover, who green-lit “witch hunts” against communists, civil rights leaders, and antiwar activists. The Bureau was unapologetically a political actor at that time, with Hoover instructing agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups it didn’t like. There are FBI memoranda outlining general instructions to “prevent the RISE OF A ‘MESSIAH’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement,” pointing to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Stokely Carmichael as likely candidates. Draw your own conclusions, but two were assassinated, one was stripped of his title, and the fourth fled to Africa.

August 25, 1967 memo from J. Edgar Hoover

After behaviors like this (which included campaigns of media falsehoods and agents provocateurs) came out in the Church hearings, the FBI in the eighties and nineties eased back at least somewhat on its monitoring-innocent-people habit. There were plenty of questionable operations (Ruby Ridge comes to mind), but in general this was a period when the Bureau with Hollywood’s help re-marketed itself as a professional police force that profiled serial killers (though its record of actually catching them isn’t fantastic) and helped bring down mobsters like John Gotti.

The 9/11 attacks caused the FBI’s counterintelligence unit to come under intense criticism. A lack of investigatory power was blamed, but as people like Rowley explained, the Bureau had identified key al-Qaeda player Zacarias Moussaoui through old-fashioned police work, but the national office had simply failed to follow up on the intelligence. Nonetheless, the Justice Department gained sweeping new authority under the PATRIOT Act, and the FBI began to transform itself from a case-making organization to an intelligence-gathering bureaucracy. The blue-leaning press paid attention to this phenomenon when FBI resources were turned on immigrants or Muslim academics, and there was significant coverage of abuses of techniques like National Security Letters. Still, few noticed when the Bureau lowered standards for initiating a type of pre-investigation called an “assessment,” or when agents once again began to be asked to develop strategies to “disrupt” people deemed members of terrorist organizations.

“STRATEGY TO DISRUPT”: 2009 FBI counterintelligence memo

Each step moved the Bureau further away from the mission of developing evidence for court and more in the direction of gathering information for its own sake, while pursuing extrajudicial remedies to “contain” or “disrupt” undesirable “conduct.” The Bureau was now exercising its own judgments more and more about what constituted threats and before long started taking aim at ideas instead of acts. As the long-serving undercover agent German put it to me a few years ago, the distinction “between people who believe bad thoughts and people who do bad things was completely lost on our counterterrorism enterprise after 9/11.”

German wrote a 2019 book called Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide that described the Bureau’s descent to a thought-policing mission. A political liberal, he guessed he’d have “sharp disagreements” with people like Friend or fellow ex-FBI man Kyle Seraphin, which from my perspective is unfortunate because both generations of whistleblowers were describing the same problems. The difference in the Trump era was the excesses were now targeted either at groups like “domestic violent extremists” or Trump himself, who elicited the opposite of sympathy from outlets like Democracy Now! that once loved any story about FBI overreach.

A big reason for the divide was the inability of old liberal outlets to grasp the enormity of what took place in the Trump-Russia investigation, which featured giant-scale versions of such old FBI standbys as warrantless surveillance, political spying, and planting false media reports. I know, because I still talk to some of them, that more than a few of the headline liberal thinkers of the Bush era have seen through the Trump-is Putin’s-agent nonsense since at least the release of the Mueller report. But the rank-and-file Democrats of this era still take it as gospel, and simply can’t grasp that the FBI became so high on its own supply, it took it upon itself to “disrupt” its own boss, the President of the United States.

Unless you think the FBI really believed Trump was in league with Russia (and as the “Bell Tolls” article explains, the record leaves little doubt the Bureau knew early on that premise was nonsense), there’s no other explanation for its conduct in the Trump era. A massively empowered national police organization that considers the elected head of the Executive Branch to be a criminal target in need of “disrupting” and “discrediting,” the way Hoover went after the Revolutionary Action Movement or the Nation of Islam, is by definition an illegal/subversive organization that needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with a much narrower mission. That’s a priority everyone should believe in, irrespective of political belief. My guess is it will take time for most Democrats to see this, and of course the whole apple cart will be upended if the Trump administration takes missteps that create a political pretext for re-empowering the bad actors.

Those are just broad strokes, before we even get to issues like the Foreign Influence Task Force (monitoring domestic speech) and the clearly corrupted relationship between the Bureau and the corporate press. 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.